Weather Service Integrated Alert Tests Going Well, FEMA Contractor Says
National Weather Service tests of warning messages integrating some traditional emergency alert system (EAS) features with wireless carriers are going well, a government contractor working on the project said Wednesday. The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System tests by the NWS, the most frequent federal user of EAS (CD March 14 p8), show the system “seems to be working,” said IPAWS architect Gary Ham. “The tests seem to be going pretty well” and some alert originators have had public alerting authority given to them, he continued. A technical problem that caused a delay related to some alerts has been identified and a solution is being implemented, Ham said on a webinar organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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Work’s continuing too on sending alerts to cellphones, said Mark Lucero, chief of IPAWS engineering for FEMA. A message for carriers “that are plugged in” to the system was to have been issued Wednesday afternoon, and “there is the possibility that you might get the RMT,” he said. RMTs are required monthly tests. Whether a wireless subscriber gets such a message is a decision made “based on your specific carrier and the handset that you have,” Lucero noted. The NWS is starting to send emergency alerts to cellphones this month using the new Commercial Mobile Alert System, a Weather Service official said on a recent FEMA webinar (CD May 3 p6).
There’s a version of NWS’s IPAWS feed that’s required by the FCC for broadcasters, which send EAS alerts, Ham said. “It is the entire EAS feed -- that’s the current feed that’s out there.” The feed is restricted to those who the commission requires send out alerts, Ham noted. A “public” feed using a newer version of IPAWS “will be given to folks who have the capability to do redistribution of messages” and aren’t required to send them out, such as a paging system, he said, and others “who might need to get all public messages.” All radio and TV stations and subscription-video providers and satellite radio participate in EAS. The FCC has required all EAS participants to accept warnings starting June 30 in a newer format FEMA developed called Common Alerting Protocol that uses the Internet to send alerts to warning participants, who then send them to the public. Broadcasters will begin monitoring the EAS “atom” feed June 30, a slide Ham showed said. It said that feed is now live.
The NWS’s IPAWS is “moving forward” at a good clip, especially given “it’s a government program,” Ham said. A function appeared to have been misused, with it taking about 70 seconds for some alerts to be processed, although they were sent out in about 10 seconds, he said. “It was a little hard to trace the source. It was an error -- it was an honest mistake.” The disruption lasted about a week, a slide Ham showed said. The solution the government came up with is to give an identification code to each developer organization, he said. If there’s accidental use, “we can shut them down immediately … but no one else is affected” and that “helps everyone,” since all developers won’t need to cease work, Ham said: It means more administration costs for FEMA. A slide said developers “will have to manage your cert[ification] carefully, so it’s not used by others.”