[EAS] Sandy & CAP

[suzanne at mab.org]

I have to agree with Mike McCarthy's post (which arrived in my in-box two minutes before yours, Adrienne).  EAS is the doorbell.  It should be reserved for sudden, unforeseen or unpredictable situations that pose an immediate threat to life or safety, the nature of which precludes advance notification or warning.  In fact, those very words are written into our state EAS plan here in Maine - and the code for Hurricane Warning has been written OUT of the latest revision, with the concurrence of our local NWS representatives.  The meteorologists, as reported by the media, were predicting a mainland US strike and a possible superstorm, with all its attendant aftermath, as far back as last Wednesday. The evacuation orders and emergency declarations started coming out on Saturday.  Look back at your Facebook and Twitter feeds for this past weekend and you'll see complaints here and there about the "lamestream media" and all the "overhyping" they were giving the storm.  You'd have to have been living under a rock not to know the storm was coming - or what it would bring, based if nothing else on what it did as it crossed the Caribbean.  An EAS alert would have been redundant, to say the least.  We didn't need the doorbell, we saw it coming at us from 2,000 miles away.
-Suzanne Goucher, Maine Association of Broadcasters

-----Original Message-----
From: "Adrienne Abbott" <nevadaeas at charter.net>

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So, out of all the states affected by Superstorm Sandy, from North Carolina
to Maine, no emergency managers used CAP-EAS to issue public warnings and
apparently NWS issued few, if any, warning products. Even out here in
Nevada, we know from the media coverage that there were evacuations, major
road closures, loss of public transportation, airport closures, power
outages, utility failures, hospital evacuations, massive fires, gas leaks,
health hazards, and a storm surge as devastating as a tsunami. But no
emergency official thought any of this deserved a public warning? Was the
coverage that good?

Broadcasters did their job, as usual. Many radio and TV stations overcame
power outages and staff challenges to go wall-to-wall with storm coverage
that included news conferences by mayors and governors, so once again,
broadcasters were ready and capable of carrying emergency messages.

I understand about the capability of CAP to provide messages for CMAS,
Social Media and Internet-based devices; however Sandy proved those
platforms are useless in a disaster that takes out the wireless
infrastructure. Millions of people still don't have power and it doesn't
matter that the batteries on their cell phones are drained because the cell
sites ran out of power days ago.

So tell me again why broadcasters had to buy CAP EAS equipment that no one
used in a multi-state, multi-agency, multi-billion dollar disaster?

Adrienne Abbott
Nevada EAS Chair

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