Weekend IPAWS Server Failure Leads to Questions about EAS Log Requirements
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) server and its backup were down for more than 24 hours over the weekend, according industry executives and several messages to an Emergency Alert System (EAS) listserv discussion group. Broadcasters’ EAS equipment connects to the IPAWS servers for Common Alerting Protocol alerts (CAP) through the Internet. Saturday morning, station EAS equipment began sending out messages that they could not communicate with the server, and the problem was not resolved until about 2:30 p.m. ET Sunday, said Richard Rudman, a core member of the Broadcast Warning Working Group.
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The weekend’s outage was the system’s longest and the first time it lasted more than a day, Rudman said. He said he monitors about 25 stations’ EAS devices for clients. A FEMA spokesman didn’t immediately respond to our query, neither did a spokesman for the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau.
Stations have been required to monitor the IPAWS server for CAP alerts since June 30 (CD July 2 p9). But the legacy EAS remained in place during the IPAWS outage and would have been able to pass along an alert if an emergency occurred during the outage, industry executives said. “If anything bad had happened at a federal level, the pieces for classic EAS warnings were still there,” Rudman said.
The outage raised questions about what broadcasters reporting requirements are during such occurrences. Stations are required by the FCC to log when they miss weekly EAS tests, said Harold Price, a co-founder of Sage Alerting Systems, an EAS equipment vendor. “Is it required to log every missed packet on the Internet,” he said. Probably not, but “what exactly is required to be logged? There’s not firm answer there yet.”