[EAS] Sandy & CAP

[Adrienne Abbott]

"We didn't need the doorbell, we saw it coming at us from 2,000 miles away."

Suzanne--
That was the same situation with Hurricane Katrina and yet people by the
thousands ignored the warnings and lots of them died. I think people take
these things a little more seriously now. But as you say, there were New
Yorkers by the hundreds who complained that the media over-hyped Sandy. EAS
activations for an event as predictable as a hurricane may be redundant but
in hindsight, you have to wonder if another warning would have saved more
lives, regardless of the NHC standards! (Too bad they don't have the same
kind of enthusiasm for standards when it comes to weather warnings during
our monsoon season when SVR's and FFW's get cranked out by dozen for areas
that have more jackrabbits than people!)

The point is, NWS is well-acquainted with EAS and the concept of public
warning. They do it very well. It's the state and local emergency managers
and authorities who haven't grasped the principal of public warnings yet and
don't get the need for official information versus rumours, hearsay and the
observations of the untrained experts we call reporters. 

It seems to me that at the very least, the devastating fire that swept
through Breezy Point would have deserved an EAS activation. Not everyone
followed the orders for residents to evacuate that area and with close to
100 homes destroyed, it is a miracle that no one was killed. And Alex is
correct, even though the storm is gone there is a need for on-going official
information about everything from the safety of the water supply to
shelters, transportation and emergency supplies. CAP is much more than EAS
and this would have been a great opportunity to see just how well CAP could
be used to distribute information to the public via the media, old and new.

There will always be the argument that some broadcasters ignored the
storm/disaster, as difficult as it seems to understand why or how. But then
I'm sure there were calls into the newsrooms of the stations that went
wall-to-wall from viewers who were unaffected by Sandy Superstorm and wanted
to see their "regular" shows so there's some justification for the stations
that didn't break programming. The stations that broke format to cover the
storm and the flooding will have credibility for years on the merit of that
work. And there will always be the tug-of-war between reporters and the
local officials who want/expect journalists to only repeat their official
information and not add their own observations. The question still is: what
did we learn from this storm and could CAP have been better utilized?

Adrienne Abbott
Nevada EAS Chair

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of suzanne at mab.org

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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