DPS News & Notices

DPS and MDA "FILL THE BOOT" for 2011 - Sept. 18th

Sikeston Department of Public Safety receives recognition for their 2011 MDA “Fill the Boot” drive.

Each year Fire Fighters across the nation take part in a fundraiser for children stricken with muscular dystrophy. The campaign known as “Fill the Boot” consists of local Firemen filling their fire boots with donations from the community for this disease.

We at DPS are pleased to announce that members of our community donated a record amount of money to our firemen this year. Our Fire Fighters collected $18,132 this year, nearly $3,700 more than last year’s efforts. Once again we ranked FIRST out of 34 Departments around the Tri-State area in MDA collections.
 
MDA helps children and adults who are affected by any of the 43 neuromuscular diseases covered by MDA’s comprehensive medical services and research programs. Such services include MDA Clinic visits, purchase assistance for wheelchairs, leg braces, and communication devices, summer camp for youngsters, support groups, and a loan closet for other types of medical equipment. MDA receives NO government funding and charges no fees to those served by the Association. 100% of the money donated goes to the MDA and the funds will stay in this region.

Nearly all of this money was collected from customers at Wal-Mart and Food Giant Stores of Sikeston. If not for the cooperation from these local businesses and their customers, we would not have been so successful. We want to show our appreciation to Manager James Miller (Wal-Mart of Sikeston), Manager Harlan Elfrink (Food Giant at 700 N. Main) and Manager Ed Spalding (Food Giant at 945 E. Malone) for allowing us to collect at their stores. We especially wish to thank all of the people, both young and old, who contributed to this year’s “Fill the Boot” drive.

Again, thank you for you continual support for this worthy cause.

CODE RED - Sikeston's Emergency Notification System
Area residents are asked to participate in the city’s “Code RED” system.

A couple of years ago Sikeston DPS put the “Code RED” Emergency Notification System in place for the City. Since that time this system has been used to help provide emergency information to local residents. This ultra high-speed telephone communication system was used extensively during the 2009 Ice Storm to relay emergency information to our citizens.

The “Code RED” system is capable of dialing 60,000 telephone numbers in less than an hour. This system will then deliver our recorded message to any phone that is registered in the system, leaving messages if no one answers. The notification system can issue a city-wide alert or target affected areas of the City by street or block.

Citizens of Sikeston can register several of their phone numbers, including cellular phones. Every Citizen is encouraged to complete a “Code RED” Community Notification Enrollment to receive these emergency notifications. To register, visit Sikeston’s Web page at www.sikeston.org and click the “Code RED” link to sign up. Your information will remain completely private and will only be used to notify you of critical situations such as our recent flooding situation.

The city will depend on this notification system a little more now that our tornado warning/siren system is obsolete. We use this notification system to notify citizens for a variety of reasons such as tornados, severe weather, drinking water contamination, utility outages, evacuation notices and routes, missing persons, fires or floods, bomb threats, hostage situations, chemical spills or gas leaks, other natural disasters or road closures.

There are many situations where this program would be very beneficial to our residents, but you can’t receive the emergency information if you aren’t registered. Please visit www.sikeston.org and click the “Code RED” image in the lower right hand corner.