If you work in the Emergency Management field and have an interest in social media, you may have run across SMEMChat (Social Media and Emergency Management Chat) on Twitter.  Every Friday, from 12:30 to 1:30pm EST, Twitter users who are interested in emergency management follow tweets that contain the hashtag #smemchat.  AWARE readers will be interested in the lively conversations relating to the intersection of emergency management and social media.  Chats are open to anyone to contribute to or to just watch.

Over the last year I have learned a lot about emergency management and social media from a wide range of participants, such as public safety executives, social media strategists, emergency managers, and crisis communications experts.  I have also found that most of the participants adhere to several worthy and implicit tenets regarding the use of social media during an emergency:

• Do the most good for the most people with available resources
• Do no harm
• Everything we do introduces possibility of liability – doing the right thing has to take precedence over liability avoidance
• Work within a short time-frame to respond as quickly and effectively as possible.

Taking part in a SMEMChat is great for anyone interested in experiencing the flood of Twitter traffic that spikes with an event.  There’s nothing like watching the stream of tweets flow by that are disjointed, sometimes cryptic, and full of acronyms and abbreviations.  Yet, I always find that a true exchange of information takes place and that I can follow the conversation – if I let go and enjoy the ride!

The SMEMWater Problem Solving Exercise

To give SMEMChat followers a taste of what it’s truly like to crowdsource solutions to a problem using social media, Cheryl Bledsoe at sm4em.org created the SMEMWater exercise:  “an exercise of social media…to see how quickly a ‘crowd of people’ can creatively contribute to solving a problem.”  It was set up as a real world problem, as opposed to a traditional exercise scenario like a simulated earthquake, to ensure that participants authentically engaged.  The mission:  to figure out how to positively support Charity: Water through social media actions. Charity: Water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Participants were charged with spreading the word about Charity: Water through any social media channel they wanted and reporting back to the group by tweeting their action and including the #smemchat hashtag.  At 12:30 the floodgates opened and the tweets poured in.  Participants reported that they had shared links on Facebook, posted videos to YouTube, connected with members of LinkedIn, created circles on Google+, followed blogs, and participated in the Charitii game in order to advance awareness of Charity: Water.

After the exercise, the SMEMChat participants debriefed and discussed issues and lessons learned that emerged.  I found that many others had the similar experience to me:   it was exciting; it was hard to keep up; and I wished that I had people to help me manage and interpret the torrent of information.

Here are my takeaways from the experience.:

1. Tools are necessary to make sense of the deluge of information.

The SMEMWater exercise was a great analog for following a more serious event like an emergency.  Beyond following the reports from the participants on Twitter, I wanted to see how they were using different social media to share information about Charity: Water.

The first big problem I encountered was not being able to track all of the social media channels at once.  When a true emergency strikes, emergency managers and first responders may agree in advance as to what social media tool they will use.  But the public won’t.  They will use whatever tool they are most comfortable with.  During SMEMWater, it was all I could do to follow the various Twitter streams let alone track other social media channels that participants decided to use.

Even when I had the raw data rolling down my screen it didn’t mean I could make sense of the information or visualize where the swells of chatter were occurring.  As in any stream of social media information, only some of the information is relevant at a given moment and finding the gems among the rubble is paramount.

Several of my fellow participants agreed and recommended online tools that monitor various social media channels and track specific keywords.  Tools like Ushahidi’s SwiftRiver* help “make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time.”  You can learn more in the Ushahidi article I wrote in June.  Other recommended tools include*:

• Pier Systems
• Twylah
• Curated.by
• Storify
• Scoop.it
• Redux

These tools aggregate data from the various social media channels and some even provide analysis of the information, discover relationships, and identify trends.  The need for this kind of service is growing:  the FBI is currently looking for software that will “provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.”

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to use robust online tools to sift through and categorize the data.  Even basic tools that organize related tweets from a hashtag into several “conversations” would make a big difference.

2. “Smart crowdsourcing”: Let the community curate information for you.

Nevertheless, tools alone cannot provide an objective interpretation of the information that a person can.  Automated semantic analysis is still quite imperfect.  In an emergency situation where social media messages are full of abbreviations, misspellings, and local colloquialisms, the odds that an online tool can interpret a message’s full meaning drop even further.

Several times during SMEMWater I had to stop and research an acronym and just because I stopped it didn’t mean that the stream of messages stopped too.  It was easy to get behind and miss a key piece of information.  Furthermore, with my attention on multiple message streams at the same time, it was difficult to fully and effectively follow any single “conversation”.

I would have had greater success if I had had help monitoring different social media channels.  This would be true in a real emergency.  A team that can efficiently monitor various relevant channels can provide the attention that each one requires.  This entails finding and following the ad hoc hashtags, groups, or blogs that the public has created in response to the emergency and following the conversations where they lead.

Forming a social media monitoring team is not as simple as assigning people to various social media channels.  Each emergency is unique and may require teams that organically evolve with the social media traffic especially in a lengthy and dynamic situation such as a wild fire.

Ideally, teams should comprise emergency managers, trusted crisis volunteers familiar with social media, and local volunteers knowledgeable about the area.  The crisis volunteers organize the local volunteers and create teams to monitor, organize, and interpret the social media channels where needed.  The crisis volunteers then curate the reports from the local volunteers and submit them to emergency managers as required.  For the purposes of gathering intelligence and situational awareness, this process becomes a kind of “smart crowdsourcing.”

3. Human interpretation of data is key.

During SMEMWater I often found that I was reading the same bit of information, only slightly reworded. The risk of reading repeated messages is that those messages tend to become “louder” and may seem more important than they really are. As I quickly scanned the message, I wasn’t sure whether the participant who reposted the message was just endorsing what the previous participant had posted, or that he or she had also taken a similar action. In an emergency, 50 people may tweet about a relatively small sub-crisis when only one person might post about a much bigger one.Social Media volunteers can provide that extra human interpretation that is so valuable to emergency managers.  They can discern the difference between a vocal minority and the genuine swell of a crisis.  They can sift through retweets and outliers to find those true gems of information.  They can formulate the true patterns and trends in the data.  I believe crisis volunteers who are experts in social media are the missing intermediaries between unrestrained, crowdsourced sound bites and well curated information that can contribute to a situation report.

Where do these crisis volunteers come from?  Many emerged during major crises such as the Haiti and Japan earthquakes.  However, they did not always have the experience to curate the data in ways that emergency managers need.  Participants on SMEMChat have suggested enlisting emergency managers from areas outside of a crisis that are not managing an emergency of their own.  Using the online tools, they can rally the local volunteers and curate the information the volunteers provide.

4. As always, prepare in advance.

During the SMEMWater debrief, participants shared some steps that emergency managers can take to facilitate the use of social media during an emergency:

• Learn how to use some of the social media monitoring tools.
• Create pre-populated and pre-approved messages that fit the various social media channels.  For example, ensure all tweets are less than 120 characters, so followers have the other 20 characters for their retweet message.
• Create and advertise the process for forming a hashtag.  For example, all emergency tweets in Washington DC might start with #EMDCxxx (Emergency Management DC [unique crisis id])
• Research which social media channels have received the most traffic during a past emergency and create a presence on those channels.  These channels can be used to provide emergency contact information and instructions.
• Form relationships with key social media users in the community who can share messages broadly.
• Form relationships with other emergency management teams who can curate social media messages during a crisis.

For more information about using social media during a crisis, please take a look at Top Ten Considerations for Emergency Management Organizations Utilizing Social Media by  Kim Stephens and Launching a Social Command Center (Without The Center) by David Armano.

SMEMWater was a terrific experience and I commend all of the participants and the organizers at sm4em.org.  I encourage anyone interested in this topic to partake in the next event and enjoy the rush.

PS.  Please pardon all of the water allusions, but I hope it will inspire you to take a moment and look at the Charity: Water website.

* AWARE does not endorse or recommend any specific products.  They are listed here for informational purposes only.

The workshop, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, will be held February 28-29 at the National Academy of Sciences’ Beckman Center in Irvine, California. The committee wanted to ensure that the emergency management community is aware of this event and hopes that those interested will be able to attend.

Workshop Overview

Social media technologies and platforms provide attractive tools for delivering alerts, warnings, and other information to the public in a crisis.  Such tools have seen widespread informal use and increasing official use in recent years.  Because of their significant and growing populations of users on mobile as well as desktop devices, such tools can be used to reach wide swaths of the population. Additionally, most social media tools—by design—support wide participation, allowing anyone to comment on official messages and to share their own observations about current events.  Such tools often allow not only text-based communication but also images and video.  As a result, social media technologies and platforms are opening new avenues for those directly affected by a disaster to become a key information source about the event for other members of the community as well as for emergency managers.

Because of social media’s potential, its informal use in recent disasters, and some experimentation with them by governments and institutions to deliver official messages, social media tools have become an emerging area of focus for research on alerts, warnings, and public response.  Although alert and warning issues have been extensively studied for some time, comparatively less is known about the opportunities and challenges associated with using social media to provide alerts and warning or about gathering information from the various social media platforms.

Workshop Topics

Topics to be considered at the workshop include the following:

• What is known about public response to warnings and alerts? What gaps exist in our knowledge about public response? How much of this knowledge applies to the use of social media during a crisis?
• How will social media fit into the broader context of alerts and warnings?
• How robust and reliable are social media (and the wireline and wireless networks they depend on)?  What segments of the population do they reach?  How do these compare to other channels for reaching the public?  What are the implications for use in a disaster?
• In the context of social media, what motivates people to participate in knowledge sharing? What drives self-organizing? What mechanisms exist for self-correction of information?
• What are best practices for collecting and analyzing social media data to create situational awareness?
• What are the personal privacy implications (perceived or otherwise) that arise from government or other disaster response organizations monitoring of social media?

For More Information and to Register

Additional information, a draft agenda, and registration are available online at http://nasawsmworkshop.eventbrite.com/.

If you have questions, please contact Gin Bacon Talati at vbtalati [at] nas.edu and be sure to follow CSTB on twitter @cstb.

With such volatile, violent weather, Alabamans are understandably looking to how alerts and warnings could enable people to get information faster, thus saving lives. The NYT article references a report issued by a committee appointed by the Governor, which calls for more geographically targeted, timely alerts on multiple platforms. (The report also points out the shortfalls of tornado sirens, which people believe are becoming less effective.) The NYT article states:

The council of community and business leaders called for a better system of warnings that would incorporate Global Positioning System technology and smartphones. People need to be warned through e-mails, text messages and voice mail based on the current location of a device, not its user’s billing address, the report suggested. The state could also make better use of electronic billboards and offer warnings in languages other than English, the report said.

Unfortunately, the article makes no mention or reference of IPAWS or the Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS), which offer some solutions to these ideas.

IPAWS was established to enable the dissemination of alerts and warnings via multiple channels and platforms. Display of emergency messages on electronic billboards and traffic signs has been talked about as one platform that IPAWS could serve.

CMAS, which was tested in the New York Times‘ own home city last month, will disseminate SMS-like messages to compatible mobile phones based on their geographic location. The threat of tornadoes and other extreme weather would likely be cause for a CMAS alert, as they would probably constitute an “Imminent Threat” (one of the circumstances that trigger a CMAS message).

Some of the capabilities mentioned in the report and article are still being figured out. Alerts via social media and commercial electronic billboards are definitely in this category. But it merits mentioning that the government is making progress on many of these challenges.

In the Emergency Alert System (EAS) Notice of Inquiry (NOI) regarding proposed rule changes for EAS was the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) proposal for a so-called “Governor Must Carry” provision. This proposal was developed because of complaints that governors were not using EAS to tell traffic fleeing from events like Hurricane Ike that all highways were converted to head north.  In Texas, instead of using EAS for the shuttle disaster, the governor convened a news conference. Other instances of failures to originate proper warnings are in the record.

During the Comment period on the FCC’s NOI, the Broadcast Warning Working Group (BWWG) and the National Alliance of State Broadcasting Associations (NASBA) both called for a better, more rational, event-centered warning approach, administered and managed by professionals.

Our premise was simply that emergencies are event driven.  It made a lot of sense to us to trigger must-carry warnings based on risk and threat assessments by qualified emergency managers. This would of course include local offices of the National Weather Service as well as duly authorized state and operational area government warning centers. Basing must carry warnings on a governor or a designee appeared to us to simply not be good emergency management policy. As we explained it, it makes far more sense to have local and state EAS committees designate specific EAS event warnings as “must carry.” Our proposition can be expressed as Voluntary Event Must Carry (VEMC). This label may appear to be slightly oxymoronic, but it does address the quandary we face because the FCC can only require must carry EAS by broadcast and cable entities for Presidential Emergency Action Notification (EAN) messages.

On January 10 the FCC released their Fifth Report and Order on the EAS Rules. In that release they announced they threw out the governor must carry provision, their attempt in the NOI to get around their inability to mandate carriage of any local or state EAS non-test event codes. While this means broadcasters and cable system operators will not be required under the now revised FCC Rules to carry local and state warnings, the introduction in the EAS rules regarding the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) can bring us closer to getting event-driven warnings to people at risk. So, when CAP-enhanced EAS comes into being, can we create a “carrot” for broadcast and cable to want to volunteer, as well as a “carrot” for the emergency management community to want to originate?

I recently made presentations to an EAS Local Emergency Communications Committee (LECC) and one of the three California emergency management mutual aid regional coordination groups to outline VEMC. Making VEMC happen will require Operational Area emergency management to become certified to originate IPAWS OPEN messages, and broadcasters to work with their local weather service offices and their operational area emergency managers in order to agree on a short list of EAS event codes that directly affect life safety. Both groups reacted positively and understood the implicit “carrots”.

The goal for VEMC is to send a clear and strong message to broadcasters that those few life-safety codes should be broadcast – even if not specifically required under Part 11 as a public service.

Starting small, I propose that that VEMC list contain just a few codes:

(1) Codes for high risk, high probability weather life safety events based on local risk assessment and

(2) the EAS EVI and SPW and CEM codes[1].

Of these three codes, the CEM , coupled with IPAWS OPEN CAP messaging, can convey specific information not covered by EVI and SPW. CEM CAP messages can carry many specific directions to the public such as directives to boil water, curfew information, and realistic reassurance about response measures as the story of the emergency unfolds.

Yes, emergencies are stories, and effective warnings to a public at risk are the headlines for those stories. Just like stories in print, emergency management can garner a larger audience for their role in emergency response by creating timely and carefully crafted warning headlines. Stay tuned.

On January 19, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) posted an RFI for a “geospatial alert and analysis mapping application” to “enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing “open source actionable intelligence.”

This application will pull from national and local news networks and social media,  including such traditional outlets as Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, and such new media platforms as Twitter and Facebook. These feeds, along with domestic and worldwide terror data, live traffic video feeds, and weather information, will be geolocated onto a map. Google Maps is included among the list of preferred geospatial coding and infrastructure sources. (Last week, we wrote about the Google.org rollout of Google Public Alerts.)

There is clearly more to be seen on this story. Much of the coverage so far centers on the privacy concerns. To put those aside for a moment, our attention here at AWARE is drawn to the other potential uses of this tool. At its essence, this application would seem to be powered by an algorithm that analyzes the frequency of certain behaviors (presumably suspicious ones) on social media platforms. If this is true, such an algorithm could also be used to mine social networks and media outlets for mentions of a building fire in a metropolitan downtown, for example, and then flag authorities.

What implications could this have for emergency management?

Given New York City’s status as the first in the U.S. to test (and soon deploy) CMAS, we wondered if the big four carriers’ local retail stores were ready tell customers about CMAS. To find out, we armed ourselves with CMAS/Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) information printed from each of the carrier’s own websites and visited two Upper East Side retail stores for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon this week for part one of our CMAS Secret Shopper Series.

The overall conclusion: there’s a general lack of awareness about CMAS in the carriers’ retail locations.

First, some good news to note

We were pleasantly surprised to discover that representatives from two out of the eight stores we visited immediately knew what CMAS was, and could provide us with some information about the service and related products.  The first of these two representatives had seen test messages back in December 2011 – noting they were clearly marked as “test”, had met with a customer concerned about the test messages he was receiving, and also knew that test messages had been disseminated to cell phones in New Jersey. The second of these two representatives could actually recommend one CMAS-enabled phone immediately off the top of his head! However, in neither case was the representative sure if CMAS was running yet, and one of the two representatives indicated that we would need to contact the carrier’s national line to register a phone for CMAS alerts. (This is inaccurate: Once operational, any CMAS-compatible phone will be able to receive a CMAS alert. No registration is required.)

But unfamiliarity prevailed…

A lack of general knowledge about CMAS/WEA and if it was operating yet was universal. In one case, a representative confused CMAS with 9-1-1, in another the representative told us that all phones could receive CMAS alerts, and in a third case the representative remarked “thank God” he/she had not seen a CMAS alert but believed the service was up and running already. Two other carrier representatives believed that CMAS was an app we could download and tried to search their phones for the app.

“You’re the first person to ask about this…I learned something today!”

-Carrier representative, when asked about which devices were CMAS ready

Our experience at most stores involved meeting with representatives completely unfamiliar with CMAS.  When we provided a printout from the carrier’s website, the representative was usually able to search his/her system or the carrier’s website to provide some information about CMAS and identify the carrier’s products that were CMAS-enabled.  At one store, the representative commented, “You’re the first person to ask about this…I learned something today!”  A few minutes later we overheard the representative showing a colleague what he found about CMAS on the carrier’s website, noting the service would be similar to EAS. The representative re-approached us a few minutes later as we looked at the CMAS-enabled phones on display and provided us with a little more detail about CMAS messages based on what he found on the carrier’s website, noting CMAS messages would differ from standard text messages and be sent through cell broadcast.  The representative was very curious about CMAS and asked us to come back in and provide more information once we called the carrier’s national service line for more information.

In all cases where a representative could provide us with a list of CMAS-enabled devices, at least one of those devices was on display in the store.  While we never saw anything to indicate that a displayed device was CMAS-enabled, we were able to find the old test messages from December 2011 in two of the phones we viewed.

Don’t expect awareness of CMAS to grow quickly…

Based on our experiences at the eight retail locations in New York City, it seems that the carriers are providing their retail representatives with little to no information about CMAS, and customers, in turn, have demanded little to no information on CMAS from their carriers. This isn’t entirely surprising, for a system that is not yet deployed. (Exactly how much of this lack of awareness is due to the different names of CMAS, we don’t know.) Until this demand grows (we expect this is inevitable once friends and neighbors around us start receiving CMAS messages and we don’t!), it’s likely that the carriers’ retail locations will continue to have little information about the service and how it relates to their products.

Has anyone else gone shopping for a CMAS-enabled device?

Stop by the EAS Category on the AWARE Forum for previous posts in this series on the new CAP EAS rules introduced in the Report and Order (R&O). In this final look at the R&O, we will detail the various items that FCC declined to make a decision on at this point. In addition, the Commission made several interesting statements regarding their apparent view on legacy EAS going forward. [xxx] below denotes the R&O paragraph which discusses the noted language. Also below, the use of the word “SAME” means Specific Area Message Encoding, the technical name for the legacy EAS protocol originally coined by the National Weather Service.

The FCC has deferred a number of decisions until after the completion of their review of the Nationwide EAS Test data. As detailed in the preceding Part 4 of this series dealing with SECC issues, two of those deferred decisions address revision or elimination of the FCC Mapbook and any new rules on State EAS Plans and SECC authority and responsibilities. [119 and 274] Other decisions deferred until after the test results are fully analyzed include: adding a new National EAS Location Code (000000 has been suggested) [Footnote 496], whether manual operation of EAS equipment should be allowed for processing the EAN [202], if the EAS Operating Handbook should be eliminated [210], deletion of Section 11.16 of the EAS rules addressing National Control Point Procedures [227], response to a commenter on a request that translators and satellite stations no longer be exempted from having EAS equipment so that they may carry State and local alerts [268], and finally considering comments whether there should be changes to the current Required Weekly Test (RWT) and Required Monthly Test (RMT) rules. [277]

The FCC had some forward-looking statements. Regarding future equipment modifications, it considers its current rules as adequate noting that revisions to EAS Event Codes, Originator Codes or Location Codes are permissive changes. With respect to revisions to the CAP-related standards, FCC notes it is incorporating by reference the version of the standards adopted by FEMA. FCC states, “Thus, any future revisions that may be made to these standards could not become effective in the Part 11 rules absent a rulemaking proceeding.” [180]

Lastly, the Commission makes numerous references to the future of legacy EAS, giving the impression they see SAME eventually going away. FCC states Next Generation EAS is being deployed “at least initially, in parallel to the legacy EAS” [16], and “we tentatively concluded… for the time being, we should… maintain the existing legacy EAS, including utilization of the SAME protocol” [18], and they call that policy “the transitional approach” [26, 27 and numerous other mentions]. However, they reject a commenter’s request to impose a “sunset date” on legacy EAS [29]. The really telling language the FCC used in its description of its outlook on the future of legacy EAS is its new phrase, “CAP-in, SAME-out transitional approach we adopt here”. [30] So the Commission definitely appears to see a world without SAME, but opted not to put a timeline on reaching that milestone.

To read the R&O use this link.

Check back to AWARE for updates on the new FCC CAP EAS rules, including any Petitions for Reconsideration asking the Commission to modify these “final rules”, as well as the FCC’s eventual revisit to the deferred decisions in the R&O once the Nationwide EAS Test results are fully reviewed.

Broadcast is dead.

Or at least it is dying.

This statement is a bit of a hyperbole, but it is worth a conversation.  A major theme at CES wasn’t the technology itself, but how the technology displays streaming media via an Internet connection.  Of all the new consumer technologies at CES, the vast majority assumed some sort of ubiquitous, fast, always on Internet connection.  This was shown in the number of TVs that connect to Netflix and other streaming TV/movie sights, as well as new TV set-top boxes that record TV via a DVR, but can also stream that to a mobile device.  As iTunes, Amazon’s Video on Demand, Netflix, and other services gain momentum, their use on a wide variety of devices is going to skyrocket.

The future is streaming

It is important to note that none of these new technologies used broadcast television as a means of disseminating the content.  The trend is for more and more media (entertainment or otherwise) to be streamed via the Internet instead of broadcast.  Even right now, according to a Sandvine report, Netflix usage accounts for over 30% of Internet traffic during peak hours.  While people are watching Netflix, they aren’t watching broadcast television, and ratings are therefore suffering.  While volumes can be written on the relative merits of streaming vs. broadcast from a consumer perspective, the point is from a technology perspective, the future is streaming.

Where this becomes relevant is that the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and other emergency alert programs have a very defined process for disseminating emergency information and a track record going back several decades.  The concept of a crawler on the bottom of your TV highlighting a flood watch or the “this is a test” EAS experience are very well socialized among the citizenry.  Right now, there is no equivalent process or socialization strategy when it comes to streaming content.  Of all the vendors I spoke with (anecdotal evidence, not a formal survey), everyone thought “someone else” was responsible for inserting timely emergency information into the content they were streaming.  Even more troublesome is the fact that vendors have not thought of how the emergency information would interrupt the user-experience and be displayed in a useful fashion, regardless of the device on which the content is viewed.

The challenge of location

Another issue to be mindful of is geo-targeting.  EAS and broadcast alerts are targeted to specific viewing areas as the local affiliates can “break into” the programming.  With streaming media, there is no local affiliate to break into a stream.  A process is necessary to determine how alerts can be disseminated across streaming media based on the consumers location.  This is particularly true with mobile devices as consumers will be viewing content far away from “home” at any given point.

While these aren’t major public safety issues now, streaming does appear to be the future of media consumption, so the sooner the community can come to an agreement on responsibility and process, the better.  The longer these issues linger, the harder they will be to address from a technology, standards, governance, and regulatory perspective.  The alternative is a missed opportunity to improve the dissemination of alerts or worse, no alert dissemination at all.

Google has also created an Alert Hub that aggregates alerts and allows other people to develop ways to redistribute them.

At first glance this development looks pretty slick. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

For previous posts in this 5-part series on the new CAP EAS rules introduced in the Report and Order (R&O), check out the EAS Category on the AWARE Forum. In this edition of our series we will address rules of interest to State Emergency Communications Committees (SECCs). [xxx] below denotes the R&O paragraph which discusses the noted language. Also below, the use of the word “SAME” means Specific Area Message Encoding, the technical name for the legacy EAS protocol originally coined by the National Weather Service.

In that the Commission is now requiring CAP monitoring, perhaps the item of most interest to SECCs is whether the State EAS Plan can require CAP monitoring by State EAS Participants; will there be a “CAP Monitoring Assignment” in State EAS Plans on a par with the current legacy EAS Monitoring Assignments? My interpretation of the new rules is that no, there will not be CAP Monitoring Assignments in the State EAS Plans. Here in my logic.

As far as a State EAS Plan requiring CAP monitoring for State CAP EAS messages, logic would dictate that since State EAS messages are now still voluntary that there cannot be requirements for monitoring for State CAP messages. This is backed up by statements in R&O paragraphs 52 and 53; while CAP “monitoring requirements” can be set forth in an FCC-approved State EAS Plan, it talks about “EAS Participants voluntarily electing to meet the monitoring requirements associated with a given state’s CAP system specifications”. [52, 53 and 117]

So a State EAS Plan cannot require CAP monitoring for a State EAS message, but can it require CAP monitoring as a method for distributing the President’s Emergency Action Notification (EAN) message? R&O paragraph 116 says the FCC is “amending section 11.21 (a) to make clear that the State EAS Plans specify the monitoring assignments and the specific primary and backup path for SAME-formatted EANs and that the monitoring requirements for CAP-formatted EANs are set forth in section 11.52.” Section 11.52 requires EAS Participants to monitor FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) for CAP EAN messages. The R&O continues, “We do not know what role, if any, state alerting systems may play in disseminating CAP-formatted EANs in the future.” This sounds that State EAS Plans cannot require CAP monitoring for the EAN, at least at the present time. Paragraph 116 goes on to say, “to the extent a state may distribute CAP-formatted EANs to EAS Participants via its state alerting system, its State EAS Plan must include specific and detailed information describing how such messages will be aggregated and delivered, just as it must for state CAP-formatted non-EAN messages.” Later in the paragraph it refers to the FCC and FEMA using these state EAN dissemination details “to conduct meaningful EAS tests”, so it still doesn’t appear that these EAN dissemination details in a State EAS Plan equate to a “monitoring assignment”. [116] Section 11.52 (d) (1) still requires the two analog Monitoring Assignments, and 11.52 (d) (2) requires the IPAWS EAN CAP monitoring detailed in section 11.56. Section 11.52 (d) (3) says to see 11.21 (a) for State CAP message monitoring.

Here are some related FCC decisions, and non-decisions, regarding the SECC and the State EAS Plan. There were comments requesting that Section 11.20 describing State Relay Networks include a reference to CAP, but the Commission feels the current language “is broad enough to encompass EAS messages originated in CAP format” and they are thus not amending that section. This paragraph also provides a clarification that, “It is up to each state to determine whether to deploy a CAP-based relay network”; so state CAP networks are definitely not required. [113] The FCC deferred any decision on revision or elimination of the FCC Mapbook until after the completion of their review of the Nationwide EAS Test data. [119] Likewise, they deferred enacting any new rules on State EAS Plans and SECC authority and responsibilities until after the Nationwide EAS Test data is completely analyzed. [274] However, one glimmer of hope on that last point is that in two paragraphs the FCC refers indirectly that SECCs “already do… draft State EAS Plans” and “SECCs, the entities that draft most State EAS Plans”. While these are not new rules, the Commission’s tacit admission that the SECCs draft State EAS plans is more than we have in the rules right now. Hopefully when it does come to considering any new SECC rules, they will heed their own words in the R&O. [116 and 269] There are a few other deferred decisions with cursory impact on SECCs. See the upcoming Part 5 of this series for those details.

To read the R&O use this link.

Check back to AWARE for our last report in this series on the new FCC CAP EAS rules, which will outline all the decisions that are deferred and will analyze the Commission’s outlook on the future of legacy EAS.