Helicopters swirl as Dallas residents face spread of Ebola

"The system is working," said Judge Clay Jenkins, Dallas County's top elected official. "When any of the workers being monitored have any symptoms from headache to temperature, they're put in isolation and monitored."

Rawlings said he learned of the latest infection at 1 a.m. and immediately dispatched cleaning crews to the worker's apartment to begin decontamination. A few hours later officials released the news and began notifying nearby residents.

Reverse 911

Dallas fire and rescue crews were sent to the complex to decontaminate "doors, hallways, railings, anything that this patient could have come into contact with around her apartment," said Dallas city spokeswoman Sana Syed, speaking with reporters in the neighborhood.

"We're working to determine where all she might have gone that could potentially need decontamination, but at this point hospital officials have indicated that as soon as this health- care worker realized that she was running a temperature, arrangements were made where she was in the hospital fairly quickly," Syed said.

City workers arrived at The Village today at 4 a.m. to alert the 330 residents. The city made reverse 911 calls and knocked on doors. Residents were told that there was "no ongoing danger to your health," according to one of the fliers handed out to apartment dwellers. Village residents also got text messages at 7:59 a.m. from the apartment management telling them about the Ebola patient, who had already been evacuated.

The community has a large population of young professionals in their 20s and 30s, many of whom primarily use cell phones and were not registered to receive reverse 911 calls, Syed said.

"We knocked on every single door of this apartment complex," she said. "We stressed that it was really important for them to understand what was happening so that they didn't panic when they saw hazmat trucks and all of the people who will be out here throughout the day."

The only other remaining place to be decontaminated was the patient's car, which was at the hospital, Syed said.