[EAS] Sandy & CAP

[Richard_Rudman]

I have offered the opinion several times that many local emergency management practitioners do not use emergency public information (EPI) systems, including EAS, effectively, and, worse, warning and EPI are not yet tightly integrated into the practice of professional emergency management. There are a few notable exceptions to this, but when professional  emergency managers do not use all resources available to them to help protect populations at risk, we have to ask ourselves, "What can be done to change this?"

Based on 60 plus years of warning research cited in the reports we wrote while the Partnership for Public Warning (PPW) was up and running, it takes multiple messages delivered through multiple means to break through the natural human tendency to deny that bad things will really hurt us. When a governor and/or mayor says "evacuate", hearing this on EAS, social media, CMAs and Reverse 911 from other sources will hopefully motivate a few more people to take that vital protective action.

We all heard and saw elected officials call for preparedness for a bad storm, up to and an including evacuations, over broadcast radio and TV. I would submit that this message needed to be reinforced in all possible ways while the storm was approaching.

A well-planned coordinated effort to put concise reinforcement messages from elected officials out on EAS, CMAS, social media should be an integral part of initial emergency response when events like Sandy approach. This is not done as often as it should because there are still many emergency managers who do not look at emergency public information as an integral part of emergency management response to disasters. I am using the term "response" here in its well-defined emergency management sense.

When emergency managers do assessments prior to declaring there is a clear and present danger to life, limb and property, I would urge them to kick off their initial "response" through all available warning systems.

This of course raises another key issue in the PPW reports: Decision Paralysis. Research shows that warnings most often fail right at the origination point. Warning Center staff has to know they are not only empowered to do this important task, but their managers will back up their decisions.

Can CAP help? Yes. 

Should overall emergency management protocols in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) be revised to make this more clear? Yes!

Should EM training and emergency exercises include this warning/emergency public information component? Definitely!

Richard Rudman
Core Member, BWWG
One of the 17 Founding Trustees, PPW

On Nov 1, 2012, at 11:25 AM, Alex Hartman wrote:

> To me it sounds like someone dropped the ball on this one if there was
> no activation outside of the "normal" RWTs