[EAS] perhaps an RFP for alarm clocks?

[Sean Donelan]

On Sun, 1 Jul 2018, Adrienne Abbott wrote:
> Hawai'i EMA says that there was a reason why they added this policy to the
> state EAS plan. As it was explained to me, several years ago, after another
> bout of volcanic activity on another island, the public was so worried about
> the possibility of a tsunami, the Emergency Management office was flooded
> with calls from people worried about tsunamis after every temblor. Emergency
> Management officials figured that an EAS activation was the best way to tell
> the public that there was no tsunami threat and the National Weather Service
> was the best agency to issue these no-tsunami-threat activations, using the
> CEM Event Code, to the entire state.

With today's technology, non-emergency, informational messages like this 
seem to be an excellent case for using subscription-based notification 
systems, tweets and social media posts instead of EAS/WEA.

Before 2006, the pre-iPhone and pre-twitter era, few people had mobile 
access to real-time sources of information. In 2006, I got those kind of 
messages pushed to my company blackberry because I was part of a telco 
disaster response team. For the general public, other than weather 
nerds and broadcast stations with full-time meteorologists, it may have 
made sense in 2006 to use EAS and broadcasters.

I'm being generous, because every state EAS plan and their actual 
implementations has weird quirks for state/local alerts.  I only dealt 
with 13 states' plans.  I almost feel sorry for COMCAST, which needs to 
deal with 40 different quirky state EAS plans. That's why the cellular 
industry insisted that FEMA act as the central point of 
contact/coordinator for all state/local agencies using WEA.