Statement of REC Networks: Public confidence in emergency alerting amid false alert incidents
This week, multiple false alert incidents took place at both ends of the country. We call on the FCC, FEMA, NWS and state governments to implement methods to prevent false widespread alerts.
Just in this past week, our nation’s emergency alerting infrastructure was delivered two black eyes.
First, it was in Delaware, where a hazardous materials incident triggered a shelter in place incident for about a one mile area in the Sussex county seat of Georgetown. The resulting alert, which was apparently requested by the local government, was routed through the state’s Emergency Management Agency and resulted in an alert that was received statewide causing panic, confusion and frustration.
Delaware uses IPAWS to send statewide panic over a local incident (Michi Bradley’s Rants from Riverton, 1/9/25)
Questions remain after chemical mishap at Perdue causes concern in Georgetown (WMDT, 1/9/25)
DEMA’s Mistaken Emergency Alert Speaks Concern Amongst Delewareans (WBOC, 1/10/25)
Next, in a much more highly publicized case; a Wireless Emergency Alert intended for a small portion the area to the west of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California was instead, sent to the millions of people with wireless devices across the entirety of Los Angeles County. In this case the county acknowledged the error. Then in the middle of that night, it happened again.
Evacuation warning alert sent to all L.A. County residents by mistake, officials say (KTLA, 1/9/25).
Faulty evacuation alerts woke Angelinos in a panic. What’s wrong with L.A.’s emergency system? (Los Angeles Times, 1/9/25)
In the Delaware case, there was a suggestion that someone at the Delaware Emergency Management Agency may have accidentally checked a box that sent the alert statewide. In the Los Angeles case, during a news conference, an official for Los Angeles County suggested that no one just sits at a desk and originates these alerts.
These incidents happened just a few days before the seventh anniversary of the false emergency alert was sent to advise of an incoming missile attack on the state of Hawai’i. This was a case where someone “clicked the wrong box” and sent a live alert instead of a training alert not intended for dissemination.
The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), which is the common machine language that is used to send alerts through the Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has options to not only limit alerts to specific counties, but also with more granular methods such as within a specific area (polygon) or within a specific radius of a location (circle). The latter methods are used mainly to benefit Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) where the Emergency Alert System (EAS) relies on Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) codes, which are normally granular to the county and state levels only. Therefore, the capability is already there and it is being used.
Over the past few years, the Rosenworcel administration at the FCC has been imposing unfunded mandates on small broadcast stations, including noncommercial Low Power FM (LPFM) stations as well as other smaller commercial and noncommercial radio stations operated by local community organizations, churches, ministries and even mom and pop businesses. One recent mandate, imposed in 2022, while stations were still recovering from losses experienced during the pandemic, were forced to spend between $159 and $4,000 to make a required update to add functionality that had zero benefit to radio. More unfunded mandates from the Rosenworcel administration are still being considered.
REC calls upon FEMA and the FCC to jointly investigate this recent wave of false alerting including investigations into the user interfaces of the various software packages that interface with IPAWS-OPEN to originate alert messages, including the over-dependence on “template” messages.1 FEMA needs to also investigate the methods used within each state to get an alert from the scene to the public. For example, such in the case of Delaware, why a very localized alert must go through a state agency and could not be placed into IPAWS by the local agency, who knows their area better than someone sitting in a center many miles away in Dover.
As many industry experts, as well as REC agree, it only takes one alert to save a life. Too many alerts, especially false alerts, can result in alert fatigue and can cause people to opt out of alerts on their phones and cause broadcast stations to only forward the “bare minimum” of alert types. This week’s false alerts only diminish the public confidence in those alerts as well as diminish ambition by EAS participants to fully engage in the public notification process.
We also call on the incoming Carr administration at the FCC to remember that not all broadcast stations are television stations and not all broadcasters are the big boys. There are many more smaller entities that are broadcast licensees and many would be deeply impacted by any additional unfunded mandates for EAS, including ones that are currently being considered under the Rosenworcel administration.
We also call on FEMA, the FCC and the National Weather Service (NWS) to implement Partial County Alerting (PCA) in all counties with larger land mass nationwide. PCA will better accommodate smaller broadcast stations to assure that program interruptions for alerts that irrelevant alerts are not broadcast. PCA can also serve as a backstop for alerts where the use of polygons in IPAWS has failed. If PCA was used in the Los Angeles case and the proper polygon was not entered, the alert may have been limited to just the San Fernando Valley to Westlake Village and would have not been heard in Long Beach or Lancaster. In Delaware, PCA would have further limited an alert without polygons to just the area around Georgetown and would have even prevented the alert being displayed in other parts of this large county, such as Laurel and Rehoboth Beach.
REC will continue to support alerting, and we will continue to encourage stations to be properly equipped with EAS and participate in national periodic tests. But with confidence in EAS/WEA at an all-time low, we need our federal partners, including the NWS, to address these issues and to move more alerting to IPAWS and reducing our dependence on the limited and unreliable legacy network as well as add in safety nets, such as Partial County Alerting and encourage the ability for more local governments to send alerts directly to IPAWS for their local area only.
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REC Networks is an unincorporated entity that provides regulatory advocacy to promote a citizen’s access to spectrum, promote free speech and journalism and to promote the advancement of small radio broadcast stations including locally-owned and operated Low Power FM radio stations as well as commercial and noncommercial radio broadcast stations with limited revenues, especially those in rural areas. REC also operates several public websites focused on the FCC, including FCC.today and FCCdata.org.
Media inquiries: Michelle Bradley, CBT, 202 621-2355, lpfm@recnet.com
REC Networks: https://recnet.com
As a developer for IPAWS-OPEN and other alerting systems such as the Japanese Earthquake Early Warning system, REC can understand the frustration that software developers of emergency alerting tools (either for sending or, in our case, for receiving) may experience as there are very few “real world” incidents and situations that testing may not anticipate. Still, for originating tools, there still needs to be a way to “break the glass” before the final alarm is pulled and over dependence on macros and templates should be discouraged, especially in localized situations such as shelter in place and small scale evacuation orders.