[EAS] DIRS 2018 Exercise.

[Dave Kline]

In this area, many of us first heard about this at our state broadcast convention on Wednesday.
Our state EAS chair had just seen the info that same morning and passed on what he knew at the convention.
Given that he had to drive a couple of hours to get to the convention, he likely didn't have much time to dig into what this was all about.

This seems to have caused a lot of consternation among broadcasters, especially those unfamiliar with DIRS.
This mainly due to the short amount of time between the notice and the exercise.

Sort of a Hawaiian Missile alert, deer in the headlights reaction, if you will. 

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Dave Kline
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On Aug 16, 2018, at 5:31 PM, Sam Roffe wrote:

>We got a email from our lawyer stating that this exercise is
>voluntary.  The objective is for broadcasters to become familiar with
>the program.  The email a few days ago notifying us caught a lot of by
>surprise.  What do they say, "it came out of left field."?

>Sam

>On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Dave Kline <dkline at tvmail.unomaha.edu> wrote:

>>SR here and no message about it that I've seen.
>>Perhaps they only reached out to stations who had signed up previously.