For two years, Centre County officials have discussed using a system that would alert local residents and businesses of dangerous situations.

The system was used for the first time Thursday night when two robberies occurred in the State College area.

Dan Tancibok, Centre County Office of Emergency Communications director, said the county had been exploring options to use this type of system for two years.

Last December, the county had decided to start putting the technology in place to activate such an alert system.

"What it does is, for example, we have a major hazardous material, we can call up a map over the Internet and literally draw a circle around an area," Tancibok said.

The alert, called a Code Red, was intended to reach local businesses Thursday night after Uni-Mart, 300 S. Allen St., and the Quinn-Tessential Scrapbook Store, 2131 S. Atherton St., were each robbed by a a woman and a man who said he was armed.

The man and woman stole an undisclosed amount of money from Uni-Mart before an employee chased the robbers and recovered the money. Police would not reveal how much money was taken from the robbery at the Quinn-Tessential Scrapbook Store, which happened about an hour later.

However, the alert reached many residents as well.

"It inadvertently went out to the general public," Tancibok said.

About 5,000 calls were made from the 911 Center in Bellefonte before officials realized the error.

The computerized system makes about 60,000 calls an hour.

Cpl. Mark Argiro of the State College Police Department said police fielded about 100 phone calls from residents concerned about the alert phone call.

Shannon Boyle (senior-public relations and Spanish) was at home Thursday night when her apartment phone rang at about 10:30.

Her roommate answered the phone to hear the recorded message from the 911 Center warning of the robberies that had just taken place.

Boyle said she and her roommates were shocked and scared by the message, but thought it was official because the voice on the message identified himself as calling from emergency services. "I thought it was really odd that they called our apartment and I think because they messed up, it made us scared for no reason," she said.

Tancibok said the message explained the situation and gave a description of the suspects.

"We keep the message very brief so it can get it out there quickly," he said.

Tancibok added that the message would vary according to the emergency, sometimes only alerting residents to turn to a TV station for more news about the incident.

"It's probably something that's not going to be used a lot," he said. "It's just a pool that is there in case we need to make an emergency notification."

Tancibok said Centre County Emergency Services will continue training workers with the new technology.

Emergency services will soon be releasing more information about the emergency notification system to educate local residents about further usage of the Code Red system in the case of any future incidents.