[EAS] FCC Seeks Comment on Multilingual EAS

[Richard Rudman]

As those of you who know me have heard me say many times, emergency warnings are a subset of the overall topic of emergency public information (EPI).  EPI (including warnings) is the responsibility of the emergency management community as an integral function of what they do - emergency management. While I am not a lawyer, I believe that the emergency management community has both a legal and moral duty to fulfill these duties.

Think of it this way. Getting protective actions to a public at risk in a timely manner improves the chances that the emergency being managed will have a better outcome.

The role of media (all types now) should be to relay information from the EM community to our audiences, and use the long form hard information from the EM community to reduce speculation and other collateral damage done by media "talking heads".

The EM community as a whole has still not yet integrated EPI into Incident Response. Those of us who worked on the Partnership for Public Warning (PPW) over a decade ago recognized this and called for a national warning policy that would fix this and other glaring omissions from our country's warning policies.

That national warning policy still does not exist, leading to our frustration on a lot of warning issues, including the multilingual topic which, as Suzanne pointed out earlier, is not just an EAS issue.

Richard Rudman
Vice Chair, CA SECC
Core member, BWWG
One of the 17 founding Trustees of the PPW  

On Mar 12, 2014, at 4:44 PM, Tim Stoffel wrote:

> What, and are stations that don't have news department suddenly supposed to have news departments that can follow up on EAS alerts?