[EAS] Maui sees ghosts from Californias past

[Gregory Muir]

When dealing with the aspects of EAS and related emergency warning systems I 
often hark back to that old cartoon showing a system "designed by committee" 
where "committee" equals:
Federal agencies...
Local agencies....
Manufacturers....
Consultants....
Users....
The neighbor down the street....
And so on.

https://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01543571d4d3970c-popup

Any entity designed by humans will eventually sustain damage, be misused or 
broken by same.  This is often compounded by agencies either not being aware 
of interface issues, attitudes towards the systems themselves, protection of 
one's own turf or simply not understanding the criteria for effectively 
creating or administrating a warning infrastructure that will minimize 
failures and protect the public.  Then when simple human behavior is 
factored in with regards to the end recipient another layer of sometimes 
overwhelming uncertainty is added.

It bothers me that our current emergency warning systems are constantly 
undergoing a form of "beta testing" in order to shake out any problems which 
ultimately results in the loss of life and severe damage to property.  After 
the fact there is a large amount of conversation, finger pointing and other 
ilk that eventually dies down and then it is time to move on to the next 
emergency to see how any changes that have been done due to the last 
incident may affect the next one.

I fully understand that there will never be a completely failsafe system for 
emergency warning.  But I feel that there can be a much closer association 
of these systems rather than have dozens of different approaches to it that 
either randomly fire off sometimes confusing the recipient or fail in trying 
to do so.  Individual tests are nice but when it comes down to a thorough 
simultaneous test of all of the systems together this is the only way we 
will be to see how things will work when the going gets tough.

Greg