[EAS] Wildfires -- Colorado re-learning the lessons California learned

[Sean Donelan]

Policies change.

Once upon a time, the weather bureau (predecessor agency to NWS) didn't 
issue public hurricane or tornado warnings.  Now it does. Other countries 
have organized their meteorological agencies differently. Japan's 
meteorogical agency issues warnings for natural phenomena in the fields of 
meteorology, hydrology, seismology and volcanology, among other related 
scientific fields.

The U.S. splits up funding/responbility in weird ways based on 100 year 
old historical bureacracies (DOI, USDA, DOE, DOC, etc).

NWS does issue "red flag warnings" about fire weather conditions. It
operates satellites to detect new wildfires. During briefings NWS is often 
one of the "first notifiers" about wildfires until another agency takes 
over incident commmand.

Recently, NWS has chosen to start forwarding avalanche warnings.  If you 
look at that same NWR event code list, you'll notice avalanches warnings 
aren't listed as "weather" warnings.  But that's not preventing NWS from 
forwarding avalanche warnings to the public.

A better question might be, which agency *IS RESPONSIBLE* for issuing 
public wildfire warnings.  You'll discover a lot of averted eyes and 
"not me" responses.  Or you'll hear the mantra, "all disasters are local." 
But those local agencies almost never have the funding, training or
authority. The local agencies almost never have anyone at the meeting 
where everyone else decides its the local's job.

After the Tennessee wildfires, and California wildfires, it turned out 
nobody knew who or how to issue public wildfire warnings.  The result was
crappy and half-hazard public wildfire warnings (or a scramble during the 
emergency to figure out how to issue them).

On Mon, 3 Jan 2022, Dave Kline wrote:
> https://www.weather.gov/nwr/eventcodes
>
> According to this list, fires are not weather related codes. I wouldn't 
> expect NWS to track or report a fire any more than I would expect them 
> to send a Blue alert. It's great if they can and do, but I don't think 
> that's their job.