[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Sean Donelan]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
> What do you think?

Just because we have a hammer doesn't mean its the correct tool for 
every situation.

There are several different alerting channels, appropriate for different
types of public emergencies.

For example,

NAWAS - Multi-jurisdictional coordination and pre-warning
EAS - High-impact, national and regional events
WEA - Immediate action, multi-jurisdiction (and some large jurisdictions) events
Outdoor sirens/speakers - Immediate action, outdoor events
Cable override/Reverse-911/ENS/SMS - Neighboorhood/town-level information events
Speaker trucks/neighboorhood door-to-door - Targeted and neighboorhood events
Press conferences/Twitter/Social media - Situational awareness and post-event information

etc.

Its too soon to judge if Dallas emergency officials would have been helped
by using more of those communication channels.  I don't know if cellular
carriers in Dallas support sub-county (i.e. tower-by-tower) WEA yet.  All
of the Dallas news stations were covering the event live, but they are
a sub-set of all media sources.

City of Dallas is registered as an IPAWS public alerting authority. Dallas 
PD seemed to be using sirens, PA speakers on police cars and shouting to 
get the public in the immediate area to safety.  I don't know if it
was clear during the emergency how large of an area was involved.