[EAS] Oroville Dam Evacuation

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

I'd contend that "wolf" has been cried too broadly rather than too often.  The problem, IMHO, is that EAS, with its county-level targeting and marketwide reach, simply reaches too many people for whom any given warning is irrelevant.  Its "overalerting," to be sure, but it's a mistake to frame that in terms of time or frequency of alerts.  It's otherwise described as "warning spill," which I think is much more apt.

Having insisted in the mid-90s on an in-band, program-channel delivery technology for EAS, broadcasters have reaped the whirlwind of public annoyance.  This is why specifically geotargeted telephone-based notification systems, including WEA, have proven so popular with government folks... they can restrict alerting to a much closer approximation of the audience actually at risk.

In the cold war days, the footprint of a major market broadcaster was roughly the same size as the effects footprint of nuclear weapons.  Today we very rarely face hazards that affect entire counties (especially here out west where some counties are as large as some eastern states.)  And hazards have a devilish way of violating the political boundaries of counties.  Thus the FIPS-code-based targeting mechanism, even if it wasn't subverted by actual broadcast contours, is an extremely rough approximation at best.

>From a warning-effectiveness standpoint the repetition of acute weather warnings... delivered to the right audience... is actually desirable.  It reinforces the message while ensuring that late-comers still get the word.  And there's very little evidence to suggest that people actually at risk object to the repetition of critical information.  The problem arises when alerts are delivered indiscriminately to people for whom it has no relevance.  That could be mitigated, especially in digital broadcasting, but it would require a significant effort that at present has no leadership.  Otherwise I'm afraid state/local EAS is condemning itself to a gradual death.

And even privileging EVI over other codes won't fix the warning-spill problem.  But that's broadcasters' problem to tolerate or try to fix.  I'm not persuaded that trying to compel NWS to send out fewer alert messages is really in the public interest.

Art