[EAS] Cell Phone Warning Failure

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Well, yes, Mike... political rhetoric always comes into it.  But from an abstract point of view, we'll never have absolute 100% penetration for any warning system, or even any system of systems.  So the peer-to-peer dissemination of alerts will always be part of the process we launch when we blow the tones.  

That process is sufficiently well recognized that it has a name in social science... it's called "milling" and it has to do with the social construction of the meaning of an alert.  Even within groups of people who all got exactly the same message, there tends to be a period of mutual checking-in and (often unspoken) negotiation of what response is appropriate, before anyone acts at all.

It's a bit like when somebody trips, or steps on a rake and it pops up and smacks them in the face... the first thing most people do is look around to see if anyone else saw it.  Nobody wants to be perceived as a dummy, or as overreacting.  When different people have different levels of information about a threat, or even what appears to be contradictory information, the milling process tends to take longer and people are slower to take action.  There's a sort of social "no man left behind" aspect to it... absent some pre-existing degree of alienation, people generally feel an affirmative responsibility to pass along a warning. 

Art