[EAS] CA Fires/EAS Activation

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Paul / All -

[Sharing this with the Alerting Authorities working group of the FEMA National Advisory Council's IPAWS subcommittee, and with some folks here in my own agency.]

Paul, you ask "if the local EOC here HAD made the conscious decision to activate the EAS..."  The assumption, which in my experience is broadly shared, is that an EAS activation would come from an EOC.  That was the case back in Civil Defense days, but I think we need to reexamine that supposition in light of the way things work today.

In present-day practice it's the Incident Commander at the scene who's most likely to need the public to take protective action and who needs EAS and other tools to be able to tell them that.  Under our National Incident Management System (NIMS) that's with whom the operational authority lies.

As a result, I'd suggest that we've been training and equipping the wrong people.  No longer is the use of warning systems the preserve of civilian emergency managers... instead, it's a tool needed by public safety officers, who almost never receive any training in either the principles or the mechanics of warning.  Rather than wagging a finger at emergency managers we need to reach out and include public safety officers in training, and revise our procedures to meet their operational needs.

It's a terrible reality of emergency management that we almost never get the opportunity to make needed changes except in the aftermath of tragedy.  Still, we've seen, in Eastern Tennessee last year and in Northern California this year, that our current arrangements aren't working effectively.  

So maybe this is the time for us all to talk with our local authorities and pose Paul's question in a slightly different form: " Had the Incident Commander made the decision to issue a public warning over all available channels (including EAS), how would he have gone about that?"  Current answers will, I think, be generally pretty unsatisfactory, but that will point us in the direction we need to go.

Art

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From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Paul Campbell <Pcampbell at maxmediava.com>

Regarding the decision of the Santa Rosa officials to "not activate EAS" for the fires, I'm a little curious just how that would've been done had their decision gone the other way.

I'm literally an entire country away on the other coast, and I'm trying to play this whole thing out had all of this devastation happened here and Virginia Beach officials decided to "not activate EAS". Yes, in the aftermath people would be screaming for heads on platters, but if the local EOC here HAD made the conscious decision to activate the EAS (I'm leaving WEA out of this), I'm struggling to figure out how exactly they'd do it.