State, Federal Agencies Not Yet Distributing EAS Alerts to Listeners, Viewers in IP
Government agencies don’t distribute emergency alert system warnings to radio listeners and viewers of over-the-air and pay TV only via the Internet, state and federal originators of EAS alerts and industry executives said. During Hurricane Isaac, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new Web-based EAS distribution system wasn’t used by agencies serving the Gulf Coast that responded to our survey. Instead, the traditional method of distributing storm and disaster alerts by broadcasting them to all radio and TV stations and multichannel video programming distributors in a region was used late last month, as it continues to be.
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Anyone can eventually get on a FEMA website that will have a part that’s open to the public containing all EAS alerts in an Internet Protocol format, government and industry officials said. Those alerts now are mainly available to radio and TV stations, cable, DBS, telco-TV and satellite radio, and Web companies have expressed interest in getting them, too (CD June 13 p5) . The U.S. EAS system includes all those companies, other than websites. Sixty-nine government users can issue alerts in the new Internet format through FEMA’s website, including 19 “state-level authorities,” said a spokesman for that agency.
It may be a few years before the existing method of broadcast warning distribution to stations and MVPDs -- alerts passed down to increasingly large groups of EAS participants in a so-called daisy chain -- is completely subsumed by FEMA’s integrated public alert and warning system (IPAWS), government and industry officials said. They said that’s as was expected, even though the FCC required by June 30 all MVPDs, satellite radio and broadcasters be able to receive and pass on alerts in FEMA’s common alerting protocol (CAP) format. “It’s no different than when we had the analog system,” said Chairman Jim Gabbert of California’s State Emergency Communications Committee (SECC).
So they can get real CAP alerts in the future, when distributed by government agencies using an Internet-based IPAWS system, and to get the current weekly test messages, radio stations and cable headends in rural areas used ingenious ways to get broadband connections, industry officials said. An Internet connection is needed to get messages from a FEMA website (CD Sept 11 p1). CMA Communications, with about 45,000 video subscribers in states including Louisiana and Mississippi, activated DSL connections on phone lines from telcos including AT&T and CenturyLink that went to the cable operator’s headends where the company didn’t have its own ISP service, said CMA’s John Helmers. “We're kind of a small company, but we had them put in at every headend” to get CAP alerts, said Helmers, operations director for Louisiana and Mississippi. Other operators in those states that also couldn’t reach headends with their own broadband service did likewise, he said. “They brought in a connection."
Time and cost expended in such steps is “really future-proofing things” for a time when CAP is how most agencies originate alerts, said Gabbert, who used to own stations before selling them. Once an alert originates in CAP, “it can be shipped to all stations simultaneously” online, said Richard Petty, Clear Channel engineering director in Baton Rouge, La. “At this point, everything’s working” with the daisy-chain, said Petty, Louisiana SECC broadcast chairman. State, federal and industry officials said there were no EAS problems during Isaac. The hurricane effectively canceled the first day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and raised fears of another Katrina because of heavy rains, a storm surge and slow-moving nature. Isaac “was our big test after Katrina, and we were very pleased,” said Mississippi Association of Broadcasters President Jackie Lett. “Everything worked perfectly."
CAP Not Used in Isaac
CAP messages haven’t been distributed only in that format using FEMA’s Internet distribution system, during Isaac or otherwise. That’s according to our survey this month of broadcasters, cable operators and state emergency agencies in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi -- where the weakest category of a hurricane prompted states of emergency (CD Aug 30 p7) -- and of FEMA and the National Weather Service. NWS, EAS’s most frequent user at any level of government (CD March 14 p8), and some state emergency agencies are sending messages in CAP format, and they're available on FEMA’s online alert feed even as the alerts are still broadcast down the daisy chain, officials said. The chain will be relied on for the foreseeable future, even though broadcasters and MVPDs upgraded their systems so they could also get Internet alerts, which they then distribute as traditional EAS messages to meet FCC rules, industry and government officials said. A commission spokesman had no comment.
The availability of CAP-formatted alerts on FEMA’s open platform for emergency networks (OPEN) doesn’t preclude them from also being distributed by the daisy chain, an agency spokesman said. The agency uses OPEN (http://xrl.us/bnprtb), but not as a primary way to distribute warnings that are carried on TV and radio, he said. “FEMA did not originate any CAP messages as a result of Hurricane Isaac."
That FEMA can issue CAP alerts is shown by the weekly tests sent by on the IPAWS feed every Monday, the agency spokesman said. “FEMA’s plan has always been to add the capability to distribute an national alert via CAP to the traditional EAS relay distribution, and maintain both into the foreseeable future. A two-channel distribution system provides resilience and greater likelihood that all citizens will receive a national emergency message if ever there is an event of national scope requiring the president to activate the system.” The nationwide EAS has never been used in such an emergency.
Louisiana was the only Gulf Coast state to distribute EAS alerts during Isaac, and they weren’t written in CAP, our survey found. Broadcasters and cable operators including Cox Communications and Charter had no problems getting or passing along the alerts, industry officials said. A NWS spokeswoman said it originated two messages around the time of the storm for the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas. They were both on Aug. 30 and at the request of the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness. They were about a mandatory evacuation along a flooding river, she said. There were no alerts in Mississippi, a Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) spokesman said, nor in Florida, said Executive Vice President Janice Caluda of the Florida Cable Telecommunications Association.
Public, educational and governmental channels on Cox, Louisiana’s No. 1 cable operator, were a source of information during the storm, with parishes directing residents there for information, a spokesman said. “As always, we worked closely with local government emergency operations centers and [were] ready to communicate with cable systems as needed.” EAS “was tested and ready per normal guidelines,” he said. At Charter, “all emergency alerts generated over our network during Hurricane Isaac were received by Charter via local sources, not in CAP format,” a spokesman said. “Charter, however, is CAP compliant.” For 32 small systems in states outside the Gulf Coast, the operator had sought a CAP EAS waiver through this year from the FCC, because they lack broadband access to get the newer alerts (http://xrl.us/bncmyd).
'No Central Chief’ for EAS
State agencies and broadcasters have more work to do, technically and to better coordinate among different agencies, before CAP is relied on to distribute warning messages to viewers and listeners, government and industry officials said. They said technical work is needed, so CAP messages don’t conflict with regular EAS messages, and some state emergency management agencies are linking warning distribution systems more directly with broadcasters. SECC representatives and other industry officials said there’s no need for FEMA to again test EAS on a national basis, as was done for the first time in 2011, until CAP can also be tested. That won’t be possible for at least a few years, the officials said.
"One of the problems is you've got too many cooks in the kitchen,” with EAS generally, as many state and federal agencies can originate messages, said Gabbert. “You've got different agencies and they're all going in different directions” and “it’s not all working together,” he said. “There’s no central chief of the whole thing: You've got the Weather Service, you've got FEMA, you've got the FCC, you've got the state” agencies, Gabbert continued. The California Emergency Management Agency has become more committed to CAP adoption, he said. “It’s going to take time.” SECCs too face some implementation difficulties, with their own forum to coordinate, but those state committee chairmen don’t all meet annually anymore at the National Alliance of State Broadcaster Associations meeting as they used to when NASBA paid their expenses, he said.
NWS sends weather alerts over a legacy service run by its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and isn’t using FEMA’s IPAWS to distribute alerts to EAS participants, said the service’s Mike Gerber. “We're pushing our alerts to IPAWS” so they're available on the Internet to EAS participants, which continue relying on NOAA Weather Radio (http://xrl.us/bnpm8o) to get the messages they in turn pass on, he said. The weather radio and CAP messages would duplicate each other if a station or pay-TV provider got them both simultaneously, said Gerber, NWS emerging dissemination technologies lead.
That so-called dupe effect is something NWS’s “technical folks are working on,” said Gerber. “We want to make sure that broadcaster types are able to de-dupe those, so they are able to detect those duplicate messages when they get them from both Weather Radio and from CAP.” OPEN uses “a form of CAP that is compatible with existing” NWS “dissemination systems, including NOAA Weather Radio,” FEMA’s website said (http://xrl.us/bnpm9e). “OPEN may be used to route messages to the NWS gateway to increase the number of channels used to warn the public.” NWS alerts won’t go on IPAWS’s EAS alert feed “until further testing can be completed,” the FEMA spokesman said. Tests are meant to ensure that a weather alert disseminated in “both the traditional means and via the IPAWS EAS feed can be identified by the equipment at the EAS participants as the same alert,” he said. “NOAA and FEMA are conducting additional testing to ensure that an alert received via any means can be translated and identified as a duplicate by EAS equipment."
Mississippi’s MEMA uses an IP system from Global Security Systems to originate alerts from a computer, without needing to broadcast an announcement, the agency’s spokesman said. “It’s just point and click, attach an audio hit, and hit send and it goes,” he said of CAP files. “As long as I have Internet connectivity, I can distribute an EAS message ... right here from my office, instead of having to go to the radio room and send it out over the old handset.” The agency has that system in place to use the “old daisy chain,” which gives MEMA “several layers of redundancy built in,” he said. MEMA hasn’t originated an alert in at least five years, the spokesman said.
Clear Channel’s WFMF(FM) Baton Rouge is adding equipment so it can directly send out CAP alerts for the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness, said Petty. That office had no comment. “Once the hardware is in place and the software is in place, we'll be able to originate from the state office or from my office,” Petty said. That provides “some redundancy, in case they lose their network or we lose ours,” he said: “At this point, we are pretty much going to be daisy-chained for the next little while” as that installation occurs.