By now you've probably heard that yesterday's test of the national Emergency Alert System did not go as well as planned. This, of course, is not a bad thing. The system has never been tested and identifying problems can only help to improve it.
The larger question, though, is do we still need it? The system itself is a Cold War artifact - developed to allow the President to address the nation in the event of nuclear war. We have made some use of parts of the system at the local level for such things as weather warnings and AMBER alerts. But I found our system in San Francisco to be cumbersome and hard to use and made much more use of other tools such as California's Emergency Digital Information Service.
We have an amazing array of new systems and technologies that allow for almost immediate communication. We're making it easier and easier to move information across systems through through innovations such as the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).
The nature of the threat has changed as well. Instead of a worldwide nuclear war, we now deal with asymmetrical warfare. Evening catastrophic natural disasters don't seem to warrant use of the system. During Hurricane Katrina, EAS was not used by local governments, although the NOAA weather radio system which is used in conjunction with EAS was used to provide weather reports.
I applaud my colleagues at FEMA for having the courage to test the EAS system, knowing that it would most likely have difficulties. I think this puts us in an excellent position to determine whether it is cost effective to fix the system or to pursue other options.
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