[EAS] Announcements

[Sean Donelan]

Part of the training is helping local officials learn the strengths and 
weaknesses of the different alerting tools in their toolbox.

Subscription-based telephone notifications work well for targetted 
informational messages, which aren't extremely urgent.  It takes a few 
hours to call lots of telephone lines, and most people don't answer the 
telephone anymore. Good for reminder messages like neighborhood leaf 
pickup or school closings. Its not as good for reaching large 
numbers of people in less than 5 minutes about a tornado, shelter in 
place or immediate evacuation.

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https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Sonoma-County-Conducts-Test-of-Emergency-Alert-System-492924671.html
In a test of its alert system Monday, people in Santa Rosa called the 
emergency operations center after getting a test call from the SoCo Alert 
system. It took the county about three hours to make 290,000 calls, and 
planners said 51 percent of the calls connected to a person or a 
voicemail.
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WEA is good for quickly waking people up, and reaching tourists or 
transient commuters passing through an area.  EAS is good for more 
detailed messages when people are awake watching or listening to 
broadcasts, and checking online media.  We don't have a good solution for 
detailed on-demand information, after people are awake and looking for 
information, but before broadcasters can swing into continious coverage 
mode.

Websites and 2-1-1 centers tend to collapse under the load.  Japan has 
tried some interesting ideas. But congestion tends to affect everything.