Case Study: City of Torrance achieves unified, rapid critical communications with Everbridge

How the City of Torrance Uses Everbridge to Improve Disaster Management Efforts

The City of Torrance, a full-service municipality of about 147,000 residents in Los Angeles County, faced significant exposure to natural and man-made hazards—most notably an on-site ExxonMobil oil refinery, an active fault line, a busy interstate and coastal areas. After explosions at the refinery in February and October 2015, the city needed a reliable, fast way to reach internal responders, neighboring jurisdictions, media and residents for timely, targeted emergency notifications.

Torrance adopted Everbridge as a unified critical-communications platform integrated into daily operations, using geo-coded, multi-channel alerts, pre-configured incident templates, conference calls and two-way community engagement via “TorranceAlerts.” The system drove rapid opt-in growth (roughly 3,000 to over 8,000 registrants in three days), logged 186,000 contact attempts in one hour during the October incident, and improved coordination and public outreach—while prompting operational refinements like message templates, call-throttling awareness and two-tier targeted messaging.

City of Torrance

Soraya Sutherlin

Emergency Services Manager