[EAS] New Boulder County evacuation alert system by April

[Dave Kline]

Simplifying is often the way to go, especially with public alerts.
I think that keeping the number of people who can initiate alerts to a minimum is a positive step in that direction.
Hats off to those responsible for your area's planning Adrienne.

We have tornado sirens. When they go off, it means go to the basement (we have basements here too). But every rare, once-in-a-while, someone decides to use the sirens to warn of flooding. They announce this shortly before the anticipated event, and the TV weather people relay that to their audience. But not everyone gets the message. Then when the sirens sound, where do the uninformed go? To the last place you want to be during a flood, the basement. This complicates things for the public.

One thing I notice in some plans is the attempt to roll EAS, WEA, and all of the rules and guidelines for EMs and other alert initiators into a single document. Some people only deal with EAS, some only deal with WEA, and a lot of the guidelines that involve things like when and how to issue alerts, or who is authorized to do so, don't apply to most participants. It seems that there could be documents specific to each area, and when the need arises, they refer to the other documents rather than including them in something resembling the phone book for a large city. (We remember phone books, right?)

Example... The P.D. at a station gets sent a new copy of the state plan (and maybe one or more local plans). If they are hundreds of pages in length, it seems almost a sure thing that none of it will be read.

Since a station is not involved in WEA, nor do they need to know the decision process that goes into issuing an alert, why include all of that? The lesser the thud that a document makes when it lands on someone's desk, the more likely they are to at least crack open the cover. If there is a reason for the P.D. to know the other stuff, they can go find it. But in the everyday world of a broadcaster, what they need amounts to nothing more than the number of pages consumed by a ten-cent comic book. (We remember ten-cent comic books, right?)

EAS was pretty simple at one time. And while the everyday in's and out's have become more complicated, it's still not that bad. But when you throw in a lot of stuff that has no impact for an individual person or station, you've lost the battle before it ever begins.

The whole thing needs to be more simple. It looks, Adrienne, like the folks out your way are beginning to recognize that. Kudos!

On Tue, Feb 1, 2022 at 3:21 PM Adrienne Abbott nevadaeas at charter.net> wrote:
>We simplified the question of EAS activations in our new plan. Only
>city/county/state/tribal Emergency Managers can issue EAS activations.
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Dave Kline - Solder Jockey
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