[EAS] Maui sees ghosts from Californias past

[Richard Rudman]

Hi, Greg:

Thanks for your comments.

 So, you are correct that more work needs to be done on testing. We have a patchwork of warning systems, a lot of failed tests, many warning stakeholders, and incidents like Maui that will be the subject of official after-action reports.

 As a member of the group that came together after September 11 to write reports and recommendations for FEMA, FCC, National Weather Service, and some other three and four-letter agencies, I would like to offer my perspective on what you wrote.

 That group, the Partnership for Public Warning, Inc. (PPW) wrote reports to FEMA that resulted in what the FEMA now calls the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). The most important word in the IPAWS acronym is "Integrated". If you read the OASIS Open International Standard for the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), CAP-based systems, it says "...a single alert can trigger a wide variety of public warning systems, increasing the likelihood that recipients of warnings receive the alert by one or more communication pathways. "Making effective use of that powerful CAP/IPAWS capability was and is a worthy goal, and one that is not utilized enough yet in government warning centers, and is sometime not used correctly.

 It took FEMA several years after we wrote our reports for them to come up with IPAWS, a concept that derives directly from those reports. Having one nationwide warning origination protocol helps solve the issues you identified, but there is still a lot of work to be done on the "Integrated" part for both originators, those of us who relay warnings to the public, and on educating the public of what our warning system is all about.

 So, while we have a "much closer association" than we had in 2001, all warning stakeholders need to up their game. We must continue to participate in local and state efforts on the "broadcaster" side to build better systems, and better ways to test, and talk to the people holding the purse strings so we can work on getting the funding to improving warning system delivery and resiliency.

 We must also build working relationships with our local emergency managers to better coordinate testing and solve problems testing uncovers.

 If you have more questions and comments on EAS and how it fits into the overall public warning picture, this is certainly the place to do it!

 Regards,

 Richard Rudman

California SECC Chair

Core Member, Broadcast Warning Working Group (Administrators of this list)

> On Aug 20, 2023, at 11:22 AM, Gregory Muir engineering at mt.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.