Emergency Alerting Studied by Fed Agency

The national Emergency Alerting System (EAS) is an important tool for notifying the public of critical situations, but a federal examination of the system found that it has “longstanding weaknesses that limit its effectiveness.” According to the General Accountability Office (GAO), the EAS doesn’t fulfill today’s communications needs, and despite some attention to improvement by FEMA, there are many technical and other issues to bring the system into the 21st century. Among the problems noted by the GAO are no geo-targeting of message recipients, no redundancy and lack of capacity. Read the GAO materials: report (pdf) / testimony (pdf) / stakeholder survey.