SAN DIEGO -- San Diego County supervisors Tuesday unanimously approved spending $42,000 to install a "reverse 911" system that would allow emergency personnel to provide faster, better evacuations when disasters such as the October wildfires strike.

Supervisor Greg Cox said the system would work in the unincorporated parts of the county and its cities. Cox and San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender recommended the county look into installing the system in December.

"This is definitely one of those things we need," Cox said Tuesday. He said that there were just two sheriff's deputies in Valley Center and three deputies in Ramona left "to pound on doors" in the early morning hours when televisions and radios were off and when the firestorm forced the first of thousands of evacuations.

Many fire victims complained they never received evacuation warnings -- or received them so late they had no time to collect their thoughts, let alone their belongings.

The fires also killed 16 people countywide, and the medical examiner's office said most of those deaths were caused when people did not evacuate quickly enough, and were overrun by flames and smoke.

County officials hope the reverse 911 system, which allows emergency personnel to issue evacuation and disaster notices by telephoning residents en masse with taped messages, will improve evacuations. They said the system, which can make up to 384 calls per minute to homes threatened by disasters ranging from fires to terrorist attacks, would be used in conjunction with the current evacuation systems, where law enforcement officials physically go door-to-door if possible when emergencies strike.

Deborah Steffen, director of the county's Office of Emergency Services, said the system "is another tool in our tool kit to get out information in a rapid manner."

"It does not need your television or your radio to be on to notify you, as it will call you on your telephone," she said. "It can be targeted to notify one house or one street, or an entire neighborhood."

Steffen said the $42,000 will be used to provide 18 months' worth of specialized software that will turn an existing emergency notification system the county bought in June into a reverse 911 calling system.

She said the contract for the County Alert Service System runs through September 2005, and the county plans to run test drills of the system within the county's system, and report back to county supervisors on its effectiveness.

Steffen said the county will begin negotiating with Dialogic Communications Corp. to provide the system.

County officials expect that reimbursement for the system could come from state and federal bioterrorism preparedness plans. Future funding to extend the system could come from federal Homeland Security funding, supervisors said.

"This is a good thing," Supervisor Bill Horn said after Tuesday's meeting. "In the Paradise fire (in Valley Center), especially at night, if the phone would have rung, it would have given people at least an hour to get out. Some of them only had five minutes."

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.