Oct. 3, 2018 EAS Presidential Alert test

Mon Oct 8 03:37:34 UTC 2018

A few cases come to mind.  I also think there are lots of alerts that will not send people screaming into the streets.  9/11 did not really have that effect in most places and it took quite some time for word to spread to people who did not have full time media access.   You also have to account for non-urban areas (the majority of our land mass).  In a lot of this country you might not see anyone other than the ones you live with for many hours or days at a time.

Here is a few times I know I would not get an alert unless it came via cellular.

1.  2 AM when most people are sleeping.
2.  Riding in my car for an hour to / from work and listening to a podcast or music on my device.
3.  Out in the boat or at the beach.  Usually not listening to broadcast media.

Alerting cell phones should not be too high a bar to reach.  They certainly don't seem to have a problem getting notifications to you from every app you have.  It's pretty long overdue coming from companies that constantly brag about their super advanced high speed data networks.  It's pretty clear that they are not taking this real serious if you look at how long this executive order is taking to realize.  We are talking about years and years.  With more and more people cutting their cable and using Internet media vs broadcast media, alerting has actually gotten worse recently.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL

> I wonder, if there were a real alert, what the odds are that one 
> wouldn't hear about it in 1 minute, 5 minutes, etc even if they didn't 
> personally get it.
> 
> Obviously edge cases are possible, you were deep in a cave with your 
> soccer team, but there must be mathematical modeling of that sort of 
> information dispersion.
> 
> It would have to account for other possible channels, word of mouth, 
> facebook, twitter, &c posts or really any informatonal source you were 
> on on the internet (e.g., news sites), TV, radio, people screaming in 
> the streets, etc.