[EAS] No TOE for WEA

[Adrienne Abbott]

TOE is not just a 911 service outage, it can also apply to outages of the
entire phone system, like the 80,000 fiber pairs which get dug up regularly
around here. Maybe the WEA organizers thought that TOE meant the cell phone
service would also be unavailable. Or maybe they were thinking that the 911
system is so fragile that there are a lot of TOE activations...either way,
it should be up to the emergency official to decide what warning to issue
and what platform to use. They can always get around the prohibition of TOE
activations by using the CEM event code but that can be misleading in areas
that are still dependent on Legacy EAS equipment. 

Who is running WEA? How did they decide what codes to include? How are they
working with SECC's?

We can make sure our EAS plans should include a more complete definition for
TOE to include landline, internet and cell outages. These are not always
self-announcing events like power or gas line outages. 

Adrienne Abbott
Nevada EAS Chair

It's recently come to my attention that the events list for WEA does NOT
include TOE (911 outage).  It makes no sense to me that emergency agencies
are able to inform the public through EAS of a 911 problem, but cannot
inform cell phone users.  I strongly suggest an overall review of
permissible WEA event codes.