[EAS] California WEA

[Sean Donelan]

What is the Goldilocks zone of public alerting and warning?

Not too many.  Not too few.  Not too early.  Not too late.
Not too small an area.  Not too large an area.

Three years ago, California emergency officials were reluctant to send any 
alerts about wildfires to the public.  Or only used twitter or facebook, 
which reached very few people in harm's way.

CALOES has made a lot of progress in three years.  And is far ahead of 
most other states (and territories) in public alerting and warning.

It would be nice if all states (and FEMA or FCC) regularlly reviewed their 
usage of public alerting and warning systems; and shared lesson's 
learned. Few states do that.

As part of the WEA 3.0 changes, in addition to 0.1 of a mile 
geo-targeting, FCC also added Public Safet Alerts.

   Public Safety Alerts - Contains information about a threat that may not
   be imminent or after an imminent threat has occurred.

Like other changes, public safety alerts require device-based updates. 
Older cell phones may not receive public safety alerts, so emergency 
officials continue to use "imminent threat" alerts.

Worse, the mobile device user interface doesn't distinguish between 
"imminent threat" and "public safety" alerts.  So the public is unlikely 
to understand the difference.