[EAS] EAS in the County?

[Clay Freinwald]

Amen to the comments below - 

Some time ago we considered trying to make County sub-divisions work with 
NWS forecast zones...and quickly concluded that this was not practical.

You can divide any given county into 2 pieces (East/West or North/South) 
and Joe Average will be unable to tell you where he lives.

With the demise of snail-mail - Zip Codes are becoming more useless.

As we move along we need to keep all this in mind when using EAS for public 
Warnings.    EAS, in terms of targeting, is a sawed off shotgun....and 
To a great degree so is NWR.

You think you are clever when you come up with polygons ....but, in most
Cases, you are talking over the head of Joe-Average.

On the other hand, WEA has a lot of advantages due to its cellular nature.
You can target a message down to the cell-site and that's really all that's
needed
If a wireless user receives that message - It's meant for him.   Regardless
of 
How geographically challenged he might be.

I echo the comments about county lines - only 'some' know what county
They are in...If you are traveling - You likely have no clue.

Clay

-----Original Message-----
From: EAS [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of Sean Donelan

On Thu, 6 Jun 2019, Mike McCarthy wrote:
> As a trained spotter for over 35 years, I value the importance of knowing
> where you are even though it's not always practical to do so at any given
> moment.

Without extensive training, ordinary people's situational and locational 
awareness is not very good. Spend a shift sitting alongside a 9-1-1 PSAP 
dispatcher, callers often don't know where they are, where the problem 
they are calling about is. Even automatic location systems give confusing 
locations - the famous examples of the Atlanta olympic park bombing and 
the more recent Washington DC Navy Yards shooting where dispatchers 
didn't know where to send responders because the locations didn't appear 
in the dispatch systems and the public didn't know the street addresses of 
the area.

That's one reason why leadership and guidance how public alert and warning 
systems are expected to work is necessary.  Assuming everything will work 
right, doesn't work.

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