HETTINGER COUNTY - Hettinger County will have a leg up if there's a terror attack on the Heartland.

It will have a leg up in any worst-case scenario because people who live there will be alerted by special radios funded with Homeland Security money.

The county is the first in North Dakota to put together a program to get an alert radio in every home.

At $15, they'll be cheap to buy. If having one ever saves a life, they'll be priceless.

Hettinger County emergency manager Ilene Hardmeyer spends all her working hours preparing for events she hopes never happen.

She hopes there's never an anhydrous ammonia chemical spill in the county, or a pandemic killer flu, a wildfire headed toward town or a child gone missing.

But any of those things could happen.

Hardmeyer and her local response team have purchased 256 alert radios and will sell them on a first-come, first-served basis later this month. They'll keep reusing the money people pay to buy more radios, hopefully up to more than 500 this year.

There are 2,718 people living in Hettinger County in 1,277 households.

Hardmeyer said the radios will be tuned to the weather transmitters, which are fed by the National Weather Service.

A lot of people already have weather radios - especially farmers - so they can stay tuned to hourly weather updates and weather warnings, if they want to.

These radios will be the same, only different, and better.

They can be programmed to sound a warning if an alert is ever issued for Hettinger County.

People who buy them can either keep them on for constant weather information, or use them for alert standby only.

They can be programmed to sound alerts just for Hettinger County, or for any county in the southwestern warning region.

Weather radios will provide all the same information, just without the ability to filter, or program for specific county alerts. It's the difference between having someone talking all the time, or only when it's time to sit up and pay attention.

A new weather transmitter will go up near Scranton this year, providing reliable coverage for that region.

Hardmeyer says people in Hettinger County may choose, for example, to also program in to receive warning alerts for Slope County, downwind and where their weather most frequently comes from, especially vicious summer storms.

Vic Jensen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service at Bismarck, said weather radios and alert radio systems like the one going into Hettinger County, play an important role in emergencies.

Internet connections and televisions also play a role. He said smoke detectors will soon contain a satellite-fed microchip that will sound in an emergency, alerting people to tune into radio, television and the Internet for information.

The program in Hettinger County builds off a national program to get alert radios in all public schools in the country.

"A weather radio is not just for weather anymore," Jensen said.

Hardmeyer said the new all-hazards alert program will allow a computer feed of emergency information, instead of the protocol of making a phone call to the National Weather Service, followed by a fax message for emergency broadcast.

She said that process can take 10 minutes, but it should be reduced to far less.

"If it's a hazard where people have to take shelter, we have seconds, not minutes," she said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 748-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)