[EAS] Oroville Dame Evacuation

[Sean Donelan]

Let's start with FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (now FCC Chairman) statement 
about the over-alerting topic, in particular flash flood warnings.

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-16-127A5.pdf

    For instance, as Louisiana was drenched by catastrophic floods this
    August, officials used WEA to send out at least six flash flood alerts.
    But as the FCC's Communications Security, Reliability and
    Interoperability Council (CSRIC) determined, the alerts "went un-heeded
    by tens of thousands" of people.  Residents ignored the messages
    because they had previously received flood alerts that only applied to
    homes located within a traditional flood zone. According to CSRIC, this
    time around people "assumed the alert was not for them since their home
    had never flooded before." In the end, over 30,000 people had to be
    rescued.

Major broadcast groups of radio and TV stations, as well as major cable 
systems, tend to react to problems across their entire corporations; not 
by looking a single county or a single weather office.  And since EAS is 
mostly automated, no human reads individual EAS messages from the weather 
service.  So when NWS offices anywhere in the country send lots EAS 
messages for low-impact events, EAS participants tend to ignore that EAS 
event code as "low-impact, high-annoyance."

In other words, because the boy that cried wolf too often elsewhere in the 
country, it has an impact on broadcast and cable systems EAS participation 
everywhere in the nation.

On the other hand, I think major broadcast and cable groups are willing to 
configure EVI (Immediate Evacuation) for automatic, immediate forwarding 
because EVI is used infrequently, and almost only for imminent, 
life-threatening events. If EVI was used for non-imminent messages, e.g. 
information about ferry service tomorrow, they stop forwarding EVI also.

On Mon, 13 Feb 2017, Alexander Tardy - NOAA Federal wrote:
> I looked at the particular office in this discussion and it has issued 
> one (1) flash flood warning (EAS/WEA) in 2017 with places north of the 
> Oroville Dam having received 110 inches of rainfall since October 1. I 
> looked back in 2015 and 2016 and the total was 5 and 4 each year for 
> that office.
>
> How is 1 FFW message in 2017, for the structural issues of Oroville Dam 
> within the counties evacuation orders, over warning or not helpful or 
> not worthy to broadcast?
>
> Yes, I am aware of the monsoon season in southern California which is 
> entirely different scope both spatially and temporal often having 10s of 
> individual real flash flood events requiring separate notification 
> through out July to September season. The fact that the entire county 
> and thus the listening area in the counties (large or small) gets an 
> EAS message is the old part of the process. Yes we have work to fix the 
> challenge of a different climate and impact for Socal, but using this as 
> a reason to not forward messages on a completely unrelated
> matter is not public service.