New rule allows micro emergency alerts
Officials: Disasters have shown need for system overhaul
Harris County officials have welcomed new and significant upgrades to the nation’s emergency communications system that will allow them to broadcast cellphone alerts to selected areas during natural disasters.
The changes to the Wireless Emergency Alerts system will allow public safety officials to send alerts to all the cellphones in areas as small as one-tenth of a mile in radius — or about the size of Minute Maid Park — once the new rules are adopted by the November 2019 deadline approved by the Federal Communications Commission.
Previously, alerts only be sent to all cellphones only in a specific county — a limitation that was particularly troublesome during Hurricane Harvey and other recent disasters, including last year’s California wildfires.
“When disaster strikes, it’s essential that Americans in harm’s way get reliable information so that they can stay safe and protect their loved ones,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wrote in a statement. “Overbroad alerting can cause public confusion, lead some to opt out of receiving alerts altogether, and, in many instances, complicate rescue efforts by unnecessarily causing traffic congestion and overloading call centers.”
The rule change is a boon to officials in disaster-prone areas across the country, who after a historic year of deadly storms had warned that the current alert system was woefully inadequate and could, in some instances, unnecessarily push otherwise-safe people into harm’s way.
Francisco Sanchez, Harris County’s deputy emergency management coordinator, called the upgrades the “single greatest
improvement in years to our country’s alerts warning infrastructure” in a statement issued after the rule change.
“Equally as important,” he continued, “it will build trust in the system by citizens who rely on it for lifesaving information.” Feared confusion
During Harvey, Sanchez said the Harris County Office of Emergency Management largely decided against deploying wireless alerts, fearing they’d confuse residents who were not actually in danger. With 911 systems overloaded during the worst of the storm, officials instead had to rely on social media and mobile phone applications like Nextdoor to communicate with residents in small, specific pockets of the county.
“I would have loved to have been able to draw a polygon around Buffalo Bayou and say, ‘Hey, water is being released, expect water to rise,’ ” he said in a recent interview. “But because I didn’t have that granularity, that message would have gone countywide.”
Officials in Sonoma County, Calif., cited similar concerns in defending their decision not to deploy wireless alerts as wildfires ravaged the area late last year.
The FCC vote also delivers a blow to wireless carriers, who for years had lobbied against new rules that they said would be expensive and could potentially overload their networks.
Ultimately, however, the FCC decided that those concerns were less important than those of public safety officials and a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
California Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris earlier this year urged Pai to approve the upgrades.
Texas Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, voiced similar concerns after Harvey, writing in a Sept. 27 opinion column in the Houston Chronicle that “our citizens deserve and need a devicebased public alert system now that will deliver timely and accurate information to those who find themselves in harm’s way.”
Olson praised the FCC decision.
“One of the many lessons that Hurricane Harvey taught us was the need for this type of targeted alert system,” he wrote.“After three consecutive years of historic flooding, our region needs every tool possible to alert folks to impending danger.” ‘Tell people what to do’
The decision also came only a few weeks after a false missile alert briefly sent Hawaii into a state of panic — an event that Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado-Denver professor and expert on WEAs, said should spur the FCC to continue improving the nation’s alert system.
Among his suggestions were longer alerts that can include hyperlinks or other useful information.
“Our research team found that short messages can be confusing and fearinducing — not really a surprise,” he wrote in an email Tuesday. “If you watch online videos of people in Hawaii getting the false alarm WEA, it supports what social science research has determined over and over again: You need to tell people what to do to protect themselves.”