News: by Peter J. Brown
EAS: Is It Adequate?
Safety personnel scrutinize weak links in safety chain
BANGOR. MAINE
Can broadcasters do a better job of warning and alerting the American
public to various threats? Can we do it faster and more effectively?
These are two questions the emergency management and public safety
communities are grappling with, and the existing Emergency Alert
System (EAS) is right in the center of this debate. A number of
states are now giving EAS a second look.
"For what it was designed to do, it works fine. However, with
the situation a year ago, we are now looking at how to get communications
and critical information out faster to all levels of society,"
says Tristan Richards, the Bangor-based director of operations at
the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) and chair of the Maine
State Emergency Communications Committee.
"EAS should become mandatory instead of voluntary as it is
today. Beyond that, my most immediate concern involves our need
to address the way in which the alerts flow station to station in
the current daisy-chain or bucket-brigade configuration," Richards
says.
Three federal agencies - the FCC, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) - act in concert
to coordinate the EAS. A quick scan of the FCC Web site indicates
that perhaps one-third of the states have actually filed their EAS
plans with the FCC to date. For a more in-depth look at EAS, which
was first activated in 1997, visit the FCC EAS web site at www.fcc.gov/eb/eas.
COLD WAR TECHNOLOGY
"EAS works quite well at the local level, but all it takes
is for one station to drop the ball or to elect not to run the message,
and that has a very adverse impact immediately on the all the other
stations downstream," says Fred Vincent, director of operations
at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management in Richmond.
Like Richards, Vincent is also concerned about the speed at which
the system reacts to a national crisis.
"EAS today is based on Cold War technology," says Vincent.
"It takes time to do the relay. Is that span of time too long?
That depends entirely upon the event in question. What is needed
is quicker messaging or a much faster - almost in real time - response
time."
Roland Lussier, president of Communications Laboratories Inc. (Comlabs)
in Owls Head, Maine, is one vendor of emergency management networking
solutions who is attempting to address some of the system's deficiencies
or shortcomings by integrating full EAS capabilities into a satellite-based
system the company calls EMnet. Several states are already using
the system, which uses a mix of redundant warning delivery systems
with a Ku-band satellite as the primary transmission source for
a multipoint warning signal.
"Our warning systems are inadequate. They will not perform
as advertised," says Lussier, who demonstrated the EAS capabilities
of EMnet at MPBN in early September. "The EMnet system is designed
to take advantage of the broad footprint that a satellite offers
with an instantaneous direct link to each receive site. All the
receivers will get each message, and yet the system ensures that
only a designated group of addressees will process the message in
question."
If the satellite link fails due to rain fade or some other problem,
the EMnet system automatically reverts to any TCP/IP link, ensuring
that the message gets delivered.
With the rapid migration of the broadcast industry to automated
or unattended facilities, the level of EAS activation in many states
is being questioned, along with the security of the system.
"There is too much room for error with EAS today," says
Lussier.
"There are people out there who are intimating that EAS will
not work. As a blanket statement, [that's] not true. In fact, the
potential and reliability built into EAS has not been realized yet,"
says Richard A. Rudman, a Los Angeles-based advanced warning systems
consultant and trustee for the Partnership for Public Warning (PPW),
which aims to develop and define warning terminology, create warning
message content standards and create a common warning protocol,
among other things. Rudman is also a member of the SBE EAS Committee
and the SBE FCC Liaison Committee.
"Our job as engineers was to build the pipeline," says
Rudman. "Local government is responsible for creating the product
that flows in it. Such things as how evacuation notices are worded
or how details are addressed with respect to life safety messaging
are not a broadcaster issue. More and more local emergency management
agencies are just now acknowledging that the capability to move
information quickly out to the public is a valuable resource to
be managed like sandbags and firetrucks."
ALERT TO WEAKNESSES
Rudman disputes the notion that EAS is driven only by a daisy-chain
message distribution.
"EAS was designed to break the old EBS daisy chain,"
Rudman says.
At the same time, he credits the rapid adoption of the AMBER Alert
system nationwide for revealing some of the weak links in EAS, such
as how fast the systems responds, how fast the message circulates
and the degree of coverage or saturation of the general public that
ultimately takes place.
"AMBER Alerts are helping EAS. What makes AMBER better will
make EAS better, and what is done to make EAS better will improve
AMBER Alerts," Rudman says.
"We have to pull all the stakeholders together so we can agree
on realistic goals for warning systems now and in the future. We
have to foster a predictable business environment so cost-effective
and reliable consumer warning systems will come to market to close
the loop," he says.
"EAS as a fundamental technology is fairly sound," says
Kelly Williams, senior director of engineering and technology policy
at the NAB. "The problem lies with the implementation. There
is flexibility, and it is up to the local emergency management agency
working together with local broadcasters to decide how to use it,
and what the broadcasters' role is going to be.
"The problems with things such as message expiration have
been revealed and the FCC has dealt with this problem, which affected
stations far down the chain in particular by increasing the validity
time for messages," adds Williams. "As for the delays
caused by the daisy-chain or bucket-brigade configuration, the FCC
is attempting to minimize or eliminate that as well."
Money is an issue. Broadcasters who just spent thousands of dollars
on EAS encoders and other hardware are probably not too enthusiastic
about any discussion of the need for upgrades to EAS or replacements.
Through industry-wide efforts such as the PPW, new solutions or
approaches may emerge.
Whatever happens to EAS as the best way to reach the public in
an emergency is one thing. At the same time, emergency managers
require a lot more training in such things as how to select the
right words for a warning, and the public needs to be better educated
too about what they need to do when they receive warnings and alerts.
Rudman indicates that the PPW is keenly aware that all these matters
need to be addressed on a priority basis.
And one of the biggest question marks hanging over the EAS involves
the approximately 19 million households equipped with DBS satellite
dishes today. This enormous block of TV households nationwide is
simply an unknown quantity as far as EAS is concerned. Where are
these DBS households on the EAS chart? Unlike cable households,
are these DBS households even on the EAS chart today? At this point,
they do not appear to be.
|
