[EAS] Kerrville and Ruidoso

[Gregory Muir]

A couple of comments.

 

Sirens - Helpful to fill in the voids that often occur with EAS and cell phone alerting.  In the middle of the night how many people are going to be listening to broadcast media?  As for local governments and their "excuses" for not having sirens it should be a regulation for installation in those areas identified as having higher danger issues.  I live in a city of 60,000 where the sirens were removed 20 years ago and no replacements had because the news at that time mentioned that they were "to expensive."  And we have a large river passing through town, a large railroad yard in the west end full of chemical tank cars and even occasional tornado alerts.

 

Cell phone alerts - With the "Code Red" phone alerting service being a user option what percentage of cell phone users have registered with the service?  How many people actually know of the service?  A lot of this depends upon the level of promotion by the local agencies.  How about operator training and protocols??  There is no time to obtain "supervisor approval" in situations like this.

 

Weatheradios - Everyone should have one.  They put the user on the first tier of NWS warnings reducing any possibility of message relay failures.  They are cheap, silent until a warning is issued and have battery backup when the power fails.  

 

In summary there will never be a perfect overall warning system due to the high number of those who have their own say-so in structuring their local warning systems . And large improvements will only happen after property and lives are lost and all of the finger pointing dies down.

 

Greg