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September 11, 2023: Disaster alerts: Jeannette Sutton, Ken Freedman and Mark discuss

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Today: Disaster alerts: Jeannette Sutton, Ken Freedman and Mark discuss

• Jeannette Sutton, Associate Professor, College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, University of Albany

• The Warn Room, Jeannette’s guide to writing alerts: “Follow this format to improve your alerts. The best 360-character Wireless Emergency Alerts will use this evidence-based template: Source, hazard name/description, location, consequences of threat, protective action, time.”

• Wireless Emergency Alerts on Wikipedia

• Maui Sent an Evacuation Alert. Why Did So Few People Get It? (by Mike Baker, Sergio Olmos and Eileen Sullivan in the NYT, Sep 3, 2023):

As more households disconnect landline telephones and fewer families have access to broadcast television and radio, emergency managers have increasingly focused on wireless emergency notifications to instantly reach large numbers of people. But that modern system has its own limitations, relying on the resilience of cell networks and the proficiency of emergency crews across a patchwork of local agencies.

Two weeks after the Aug. 8 Lahaina fire, as Hurricane Hilary was threatening California, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department found that it could not send a wireless evacuation alert to the community of Seven Oaks, where several people were ultimately left stranded and one remains missing. The county cited a breakdown in its connection to the wireless alert system, which is managed by the federal government.

. . . The patchwork nature of the system was made evident again last week, as Hurricane Idalia was barreling toward the Florida coast. As 30 counties announced various evacuation orders, some local agencies pushed them out via wireless alerts on the federal network, but many did not.

. . . Ms. Sutton, the professor who specializes in emergency alerts, said it was important to build more redundancies into the emergency alert system, look at burying cables to make it more resilient and remember that the wireless system cannot be relied on alone to warn people that danger is imminent.

• Was Hurricane Hilary overhyped? It wasn't unprecedented, but warnings likely saved lives (Los Angeles Times, Aug 29, 2023): “Officials issued the region’s first-ever tropical storm watch — later upgraded to a warning — for a broad swath of the Southland as the cyclone’s path grew more clear, likely to become the first storm of that strength to hit the region in decades.”

“. . . And therein may lie perhaps the biggest difference between Hilary and the other two tropical storms that most recently hit Southern California: the National Weather Service had recently bolstered its operations and alert systems for this exact situation. Hilary becoming the first West Coast storm to get an official tropical storm warning — which officials have credited for increasing awareness and minimizing harm — didn’t necessarily mean Hilary was a stronger, wetter or more dangerous system. The storm just happened to come right after local forecast offices gained the capability to issue such a warning.”

• Cars would be required to keep AM radio under new bipartisan bill (The Verge, May 17, 2023): “Some automakers are dropping AM radio, citing electromagnetic interference with EV powertrains. But a bipartisan group of senators led by Ed Markey and Ted Cruz is pushing back.”

• Ford reverses plan to ditch AM radio after congressional attention: Pending legislation would mandate an AM radio in all new cars (Ars Technica, May 23, 2023): "Although AM radio is mostly used by its adherents to listen to talk radio, sports, and local traffic, a bipartisan collection of Senators and Representatives introduced a bill last week to mandate the inclusion of AM radio in all new cars so they can receive messages in the case of an emergency."

• As Canadian wildfires rage, Facebook’s news ban reveals the importance of radio (The Conversation, Aug 22, 2023): “reading about the Meta news block may lead people to mistakenly assume that social media is the only source of information on the current wildfire situation in N.W.T. and Kelowna. It’s not. We should not overlook the significance of ‘free-to-air’ broadcast radio in delivering reliable and trustworthy information to citizens.”

• The Power of the AM (by Damon Krukowski, June 20, 2023): "Maybe you think it’s only traffic and weather together, but my local AM radio news station – WBZ Boston – is one of seventy-seven “Primary Entry Point” (PEP) sources that the US government has determined could reach 90% of the population in times of emergency. Toward that end, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has equipped WBZ with an “all hazards shelter.” “The shelter includes a generator with a 60,000-gallon fuel tank and a separate studio that can be occupied for up to 60 days. It has been hardened to remain usable in the presence of chemical, biological and nuclear hazards,” reported RadioWorld in October 2021."

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