Hurricane Katrina, other severe hurricanes and the Virginia Tech shootings have contributed to heightened expectations that emergency managers inform citizens of anything that will impact their safety. However, current efforts to alert the public to threats have largely been limited to individual states, cities and counties that provide subscription-based alerts to residents. Therefore, if someone is visiting from out of town when a disaster hits, they may be out of the loop.

To address this, Congress passed the WARN Act in 2006, which called for the creation of a comprehensive emergency notification network that would expand the Emergency Alert System to provide geographically targeted alerts to wireless phones, Web browsers and other devices. The Emergency Alert System currently provides alerts over television and radio broadcasts.

The FCC and FEMA have taken the next step in the development of the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), the component of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System that will provide citizens notification of imminent threats to life and property wherever they are without having to subscribe with a particular agency. 

On Dec. 7, the FCC and FEMA released the design specifications for wireless carriers to start building the interfaces between their networks and a message aggregation system the federal government plans to build. The federal aggregation system will collect and authenticate the messages from states and localities before pushing them out to the cell phones of people in the area impacted by a disaster.

Many states and localities already operate emergency notification services where residents can receive emergency alerts and information on their mobile devices. With CMAS, cell phone subscribers will automatically receive information about disasters wherever they happen to be. “Say you’re from New York state and you’re traveling down to Florida for vacation, then you’ll be able to get an alert if a hurricane is impending or there is some other type of emergency in a particular area, say for example, Orlando. Even though you’re from New York, you’re in Orlando, you’re going to get that message,” said Robert Kenny, a spokesman for the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. 

So far all of the major wireless carriers have signed on to provide the alerts to their subscribers, according to Kenny. However, citing cost, some of the smaller carriers have decided not to participate in the program, which means alerts won’t be forwarded to their subscribers. However, wireless carriers that aren’t currently participating could elect to participate later, Kenny said.

Wireless carriers have 28 months from Dec. 7 to build and test their systems before CMAS is scheduled to be available to the public. The federal aggregator is expected to be ready for testing in November 2011 with messages being delivered over wireless providers’ networks to the public in February 2012.

Once CMAS is operational, emergency managers will be able to develop an alert at a state, local or federal emergency operations center and then send it to the federal alert aggregator where will it be authenticated and sent to CMAS for distribution over carriers’ networks to subscribers in the affected area.

“The major benefit for emergency managers,” Kenny said, “is knowing in advance that the public is going to be given fair warning to, say for example, adverse weather — such as a hurricane or flooding in a particular area. So there are some assurances, at least from an emergency management standpoint, that the public has been informed in multiple ways.”

It’s unclear if CMAS will require investments in new notification systems at the state and local level, according to Rick Wimberly, president of public safety consulting firm Galain Solutions. This will be one of the next issues to be worked out.
 
[Photo courtesy of Marvin Nauman/FEMA.]