[EAS] concerning the request for new weather Event Codes

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

So what's your metric of success, Dave?  Sounds like your chief goal may be scaring off officials from using EAS at all.  Knowing that a committee is going to second-guess their every public warning decision, wouldn't the most rational course be for them to avoid issuing warnings at all?  If so, you might also want to train them in the two standard excuses for warning nonfeasance:

1) "I didn't want to start a panic."  Notwithstanding that the myth of warning-driven panic has been comprehensively and repeatedly debunked, this one has the advantage of making the speaker sound thoughtful, at least to the uninformed, while pandering to responders' senses of elitism.  It's the "you can't handle the truth!" argument.

2) "We didn't have complete information yet."  As if anyone ever does!  Uncertainty is an essential reality of emergency management and a willingness to deal with it is what separates practitioners from armchair quarterbacks.  Very few people have ever died from a false alarm.

But is that really the outcome we want?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of Dave Kline

And there you have it! The T word.
Training... everyone wants to play with the toys, but they just don't want to bother with learning how to use the toys.
I sat on the committee that drafted a Local plan for our county and surrounding area.
No one, under any circumstances, will issue an alert without having been properly trained.
Then there will be a committee to review the alert to see if it was handled properly. 

Dave