How to Set Up CruzAware Alerts (and What They Cover)

The short version

• Sign up at cruzaware.org. The county publishes no fee for registration, standard carrier rates apply, and it takes about ten minutes. It's how the county sends evacuation notices and other urgent alerts by text, phone call, email, and a mobile app.
• Have an email address, your phone number, and your street address ready. The address is what ties you to the alerts for your specific area.
• Weather alerts are a separate opt-in. Registering doesn't turn them on; you switch them on in your account's Notifications area afterward.
• Register more than one contact method. No alert system can guarantee delivery.
• CruzAware is for receiving information. In an actual emergency, call 911.

Up here, a fire or a flood can move faster than word of mouth, and the phone tree that used to warn a canyon town doesn't outrun either one. So if you do one preparedness task this month, make it this: sign up for CruzAware, Santa Cruz County's alert system, at cruzaware.org.

It's how the county sends evacuation notices and other urgent alerts by text, phone call, email, and a mobile app, and it's about the single highest-value ten minutes of preparedness on offer for a Boulder Creek address. One thing to be clear about first: CruzAware is for receiving information. In an actual emergency, call 911.

What CruzAware Is

CruzAware is the official emergency and non-emergency alert system for Santa Cruz County, operated by the County of Santa Cruz together with Santa Cruz Regional 9-1-1, the agency that dispatches for communities across Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.

The county's alert information page describes what it carries: critical information during natural disasters, severe weather events, and public safety incidents, plus non-emergency notices like roadwork and community-level impacts. The county lists four ways those messages reach you: text message, phone call, email, and a mobile app.

The non-emergency messages are for residents of unincorporated areas of the county. Boulder Creek is unincorporated, so that part of the system applies here: road work, utility work, and other community-level impacts on our side of the county line.

The signup site lives at cruzaware.org, which takes you to a registration portal hosted by Genasys, the county's alert platform vendor. The portal describes itself as "the emergency and non-emergency alert and warning system for the residents of Santa Cruz County." It's available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and per the county's CruzAware FAQ, your information is used only for alerts and isn't sold or shared outside the system.

Anyone with a stake in the county can register: people who live here, work here, own property here, or just want to keep an eye on conditions for family who do.

What the Alerts Cover

The county's FAQ lists the range: earthquakes, floods, gas leaks, power outages, fires, and other situations that affect safety. Alerts can be geo-targeted, meaning they go to people who registered an address in the affected area.

That's the detail that matters most for San Lorenzo Valley residents. An evacuation warning for a specific slice of Boulder Creek reaches the accounts that put an address in that slice, which is why the address step below isn't optional busywork.

Topic-based alerts, including weather, are a separate opt-in. Registering does not turn them on. You select them in your account's Notifications area after you sign up, and step 4 below walks through it.

There's a limit worth knowing, straight from the county's own FAQ: no system can guarantee delivery. Phones get turned off, texts fail, emails land in spam. The county's advice is to register more than one contact method, and it's good advice.

How to Sign Up, Step by Step

Here's what the registration form asks for. You'll need an email address, your phone number, and your street address.

1. Go to cruzaware.org. You'll land on the registration portal. Under the Login box, find "Don't have an account?" and select "Click here to register."
2. Enter your email address. The form marks this required, and it's used for alerts and account recovery.
3. Enter your cell phone number and leave the "Receive text messages on this phone" box checked if the phone can get texts. The form lets you register with phone, email, or both, and recommends both so alerts reach you in more situations. If your phone can't receive texts, an email is required.
4. Enter your full street address and pick the match from the dropdown list as you type. This is required, and it's what ties you to location-specific alerts. The form's own tip: if your address doesn't appear, add your zip code, or click your location on the little map. Rural addresses in the valley sometimes need that nudge.
5. Create a password, confirm it, and select Register. The password must be at least 12 characters and include at least one number, one capital letter, and one lowercase letter, with no spaces. Special characters are not required. The form runs a reCAPTCHA check as part of submission.

That's the core signup. If anything on the form looks different when you get there, follow what the portal says; the form is the source of truth and it does get updated.

After You Register: Five Minutes of Fine-Tuning

Once you're in, the account menu lets you strengthen your setup. The county FAQ walks through each item.

1. Add more locations. You can register multiple addresses: home, work, a kid's school, an aging parent's place in the valley. Each one extends your geo-targeted coverage.
2. Add more contact methods. Additional emails and phone numbers, including a landline or a family member's cell, can all receive your alerts.
3. Save the senders in your phone. The portal lists exactly how alerts arrive: phone calls from +1 (831) 453-0048, texts from short code 65513, and email from CruzAware. The portal gives the email sender as noreply@genasys.com and the county FAQ gives it as cruzaware@genasys.com, so safelist both addresses, or safelist the genasys.com domain. Create a contact called "Santa Cruz County Alerts" with that phone number so a 2 a.m. call gets answered instead of ignored.
4. Turn on weather alerts. This is a separate opt-in. Registering does not give you CruzAware weather alerts. The portal's own warning: to receive weather alerts you must select the weather categories in the Notifications area of your account and have an address on file. Do both. In a canyon that floods, this is the step to not skip.
5. Check the prescribed-burn box. In the same Notifications area, the county directs residents to check "Prescribed burn" to get prescribed-fire notices from the County, CAL FIRE, and State Parks. Useful here, where smoke in the air is a question worth answering fast.

If you have questions the portal doesn't answer, the county's contact for the system is CruzAware@santacruzcountyca.gov, listed right on the portal.

If It Says You're Already Registered

Common situation: you try to sign up and get a pop-up saying your email or number is already registered. That's usually not an error. When the county moved from its old CodeRED system to CruzAware, existing contact information was transferred over.

The portal's instruction is to go back to the login screen, choose "Forgot your Password?", and enter your email or cell number to reset access. Once you're in, check that your addresses and contact methods are current, because a migrated account may be carrying old information.

How CruzAware Differs from NWS and PG&E Alerts

These three systems overlap less than people assume, and the safest setup is all three.

CruzAware is county-operated and opt-in. It's the channel for local emergency instructions, including evacuation warnings and orders, and it only knows the contact methods and addresses you give it.

National Weather Service products come from the federal forecast office for the San Francisco Bay Area (based in Monterey), which covers Santa Cruz County. The NWS issues the underlying weather watches and warnings. The most severe ones can also reach your phone automatically through Wireless Emergency Alerts, the federal push system that needs no signup, which the county lists as a separate channel alongside NOAA Weather Radio and the Emergency Alert System. NWS tells you a dangerous storm is coming; CruzAware is where local agencies tell you what to do about it here.

PG&E notifications are separate again. PG&E offers outage updates by text, email, or phone when you sign up through your PG&E online account, and those alerts are about electric service tied to your account. They won't carry evacuation information, and CruzAware won't give you outage restoration estimates. PG&E's own rule for a downed line applies no matter what alerts you have: call 911 first, then PG&E at 1-800-743-5000. For the rest of your outage prep, see our Boulder Creek power outage plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does CruzAware cost anything?

The county publishes no fee for registration, and standard text and call rates from your carrier apply. Registration asks only for contact details, an address, and a password.

Do I need to give my address?

The live form requires an address at signup, and it's central to how the system works: geo-targeted alerts, including evacuation notices for your specific area, depend on it. An address alone isn't enough for weather alerts, though. Those also require selecting the weather categories in your account's Notifications area. You can add more addresses after registering.

Will I get alerts if I never sign up?

Some, maybe. The most severe warnings can arrive through Wireless Emergency Alerts, which are automatic. But WEA is a blunt instrument, and county alerts targeted to your neighborhood go only to registered CruzAware contacts. Don't count on being covered without signing up.

Is signing up a guarantee I'll be warned in time?

No, and the county says as much. Delivery can fail if your phone is off, your contact info is stale, or a message lands in spam. Register multiple contact methods, keep them current, and treat alerts as one layer alongside your own awareness of conditions.

How do I update my info or unsubscribe?

Log in at cruzaware.org and use the account menu to edit contacts, addresses, and notification settings. There's an Unsubscribe option that the county FAQ says deletes your contact data from the system.

Last reviewed July 3, 2026. Details here follow official sources from Santa Cruz County, the county's CruzAware FAQ, and the Genasys registration portal. Program details and requirements come from the responsible county agencies, not from a general article like this one.

Signing up takes about ten minutes and it's the foundation the rest of your preparedness sits on. When it's done, put the other emergency contacts and utility details in one place with the Boulder Creek Residents guide.