[EAS] Oroville Dame Evacuation

[Sean Donelan]

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
> other.  It's very confusing for alert originators... all the more so 
> since the different codes may be programmed by individual stations for 
> different processing.

Often it seems the National Weather Service is the organization with 
people trained to create public alerts, and have extensive understanding 
of all the different alerting codes and warning systems.

A problem as seen in the Gatlinburg fire and the Oroville dam; the 
national weather service is not authorized to send EVI (or other 
non-weather emergency messages) through IPAWS to cell phones. IPAWS
assumes EVI (and other NWEM) are supposed to be originated by civil 
authorities, and not back-feed from NWS.

The use of Flash Flood Warning (FFW) allowed NWS to send both EAS and 
WEA. Unfortunately, NWS' overuse of FFW means most EAS participants 
NEVER forward flash flood warnings, and ignore them.

Twitter, facebook and direct media blasts don't have those problems. 
Fortunately, the Oroville Dam warning happened during afternoon drive 
primetime, and peak public attention time.  If it had happened during the 
middle of the night, the results may have been different.