[EAS] FCC Seeks Comment on Multilingual EAS

[Richard Rudman]

Bill is right (as usual)

To expand on Bill's thought below, and explain why EPI is important, you have to take to heart the definition of "warning" in this context:

A warning provides clear and timely protective actions to be taken by a portion of the public whose lives and property are at imminent risk.

This is my adaptation of the definition of "warning" that goes to the heart of what EPI is all about that came from Partnership for Public Warning (PPW) reports back in 2002 and 2003 .

Stated another way, it is not enough to tell people at risk to "head for the hills." You have to tell them which hills to head for, what they need to take with them, what route to take, and what to do when they get there.

As I said in an earlier post on this thread, EPI in my opinion is a legal and moral duty of government. Our job is to get their EPI to the public. There is an element of shared responsibility here, but the specifics were never clear during the 50's and 60's and have been further blurred over time for a number of reasons.

I have not given up hope yet that the United States can have the national warning policy the PPW called for a decade ago. Congress will someday see this as a bipartisan necessity, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Richard Rudman

On Mar 14, 2014, at 8:20 PM, Bill Ruck wrote:

>On one hand the public deserves the best Emergency Public Information 
>possible.  Technology exists today to do this.