[EAS] Fire

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Dave,

People are human, and we know a few things about humans.  One of those things is that people don't respond to a single warning message by taking protective action.  Nobody wants to act on a misunderstanding, and humans generally have a "normalcy bias" (aka "denial") firmly in place as regards unexpected news.  Rather than embarrass themselves by overreacting, they look for confirmation and corroboration from others first.  (Warning researcher Dennis Mileti dubbed this process "milling")  

They talk to other people around them, seek confirmation through additional channels, and, if nothing else, they call 9-1-1.  Unfortunately, the way we live in the U.S. nowadays, frequently 9-1-1 is the closest available source for a lot of people, especially late at night.  We can't count on someone tuning around and hearing the same message on multiple stations.  And many people sleep and work alone.

So, taking humanity as we find it, that outreach to 9-1-1 is predictable.  Are people wrong to be human?  I'm not sure what that question even means.  Certainly it's inconvenient for us.  The real question is to what extent we who are practitioners of warning actually understand what we're doing.  Pointing fingers may make us feel proud of ourselves, but achieves little else.

On the question of ' why an alert for so many [about something] that affected so few?'  I'd say that's a fine question.  As soon as the broadcasters come to grips with that problem and quit fighting to preserve and perpetuate our low-resolution legacy EAS, maybe we'll be able to solve that.  Until then I'm afraid it's just baked into our system, and that's not 'people's fault.

Art