[EAS] The words we use

[Sean Donelan]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2017, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
> There are very few alerting scenarios that require notifying everyone in a county,  much less everyone in a multi-county metro.  There are many that only involve alerting everybody in a few square miles or even a few blocks.

Yep.  That's why I keep saying you need different systems for different 
purposes. The problem is different systems become redundant, expensive 
systems. If you already paid for one system, you tend to use one system 
for everything.

> This is one of the reason emergency agencies flocked to telephone 
>notification systems even if they had to spend their own money... the 
>"reverse 9-1-1" technology allowed very tight and precise targeting of 
>message delivery, so that people who weren't affected by a situation 
>wouldn't be calling their city councilmembers or county supervisors the 
>next day complaining about the "unnecessary" interruption.

But, technology didn't stop 20 years ago.  Less than 50% of homes now 
have a hardline telephone, and less than 20% sign up to subscription 
notification services on their mobile phones. Fewer people watch 
broadcast or cable TV.

Other than door-to-door warnings, which will miss some people sleeping or 
returning home after the door knocker passed, hyper-local targeting is 
slow and expensive. Mass media and mass notification assumes a large 
population. If you want to do one-to-one notification, you need different 
tools.  That is true for mass advertising versus direct advertising, and 
also true for any type of public contact.

If you want to notify people only within a 2 block area, are there a 
better tools than trying to force a radio broadcast to obey 
civil boundaries?

Other the other hand, trying to direct dial 7 million people in New York 
city using a reverse-911 system probably isn't the right tool for that 
task either.

> When all we had was EAS, everything looked like an EAS application. 
> But those days are past.

Now we have CAP, and everything looks like a CAP application.

There are lots of tools in today's toolbox.  Sometimes the tools need to 
be adapted to specific technology, and need to be updated with changing 
times.