[EAS] Deja Vu: Boulder officials questioned over effectiveness of emergency notification system

[Sean Donelan]

See previous reviews of Tennessee wildfires, California wildfires....

Opt-in, or subscription based, systems work well for non-emergency, 
non-time critical alerts for people with interest.  School weather 
closings, reminders about trash collection, etc.

Opt-in systems rarely reach more than 25% of the population, and almost 
never reach tourists and transient populations in the area. Opt-in 
systems don't work well for large-scale emergencies needing to reach as 
many people in the shortest amount of time.  There is a range of public 
warning and alerting options. They each have their strengths and 
weaknesses.

https://kdvr.com/news/local/boulder-emergency-alert-system/

Officials in Boulder are taking measures to ensure that any future 
evacuation-inducing emergencies do not have notification delivery issues 
similar to the ones reported in Superior and Louisville during the 
Marshall Fire.

After the historic disaster caught many in the county off guard, the 
Boulder County Sheriff's Office began receiving questions in regards to 
why there was a lack of evacuation orders sent out to residents who felt 
they should have been notified to do so.

Boulder County's current emergency notification system, Everbridge, can 
access landlines, cell phones, text messages, TTY/TDD, emails or faxes. A 
limitation it carries, however, is those who receive the alerts, must have 
created an account with an address beforehand.

  [...]
Boulder's Office of Disaster Management won approval to complete the 
upgrade to this technology back in 2019, but COVID-19 slowed that process. 
The full transition is expected to be completed at some point in 2022.