PITTSFIELD, Mass. - In an effort to be more inclusive to residents, the City of Pittsfield is adding three new languages to their emergency notification system.

The city has added Spanish, French and Portuguese to their CodeRED portfolio. CodeRED has been in place since 2013. It currently services more than 16,000 residents, giving citywide and neighborhood-specific notifications.

Public information officer Roberta McCulloch-Dews said it was important to expand the notification languages for their growing communities.

"Code-RED is so essential, I mean it's instantaneous, so when we want to get to the people right away it gets to their phone, it gets to their land-line, it gets to their text, email - it gets everything," McCulloch-Dews said.

"We knew that we already had a really vibrant Spanish-speaking community, but we also wanted to find out who else were we missing. So we reached out to the Berkshire Immigrant Center and they were able to tell us that we had a lot of members of our community from the Ivory Coast of West Africa, as well as from Brazil, so it really made sense to add French and Portuguese to our portfolio."

McColluch-Dews is encouraging everyone to sign up for CodeRED notifications. She said the city will continue to listen to community feedback if more languages are needed in the future.​