Should Netflix and Hulu give you emergency alerts?

Tue Mar 12 23:25:56 UTC 2019

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019, Clayton Zekelman wrote:
> It's very fortunate that nobody was seriously injured after that total 
> failure of the process.
>
> The people who run this stuff need to understand that a false alert can be 
> very dangerous.

I agree lack of training and funding for local emergency managers is an 
ongoing problem.

In absolute numbers, more people have died without receiving warnings 
about an imminent hazard (mostly wildfires and tornados) in each of the 
last 5 years than have been severely injured after all the false EAS and 
WEA alerts combined in the last 5 years.

Of course, its impossible to attribute cause of death directly due to 
lack of warning. But local officials being so afraid of issuing warnings 
means they don't issue them at all, or too late. It doesn't attract as 
much press attention, but lack of warning has been a recurring issue in 
local disasters.

The National Weather Service does a good job with weather warnings, maybe 
too much overwarning.  On the other hand, if a non-weather hazard such as 
a wildfire, industrial accident, chemical cloud happens; local emergency 
managers have little practice or training how to alert the public.

Amber alerts are another matter.

NCMEC (Amber Alerts) had the largest geographic area, between 100,000 sqkm
and 1,000,000 sqkm. This might indicate over-alerting geographic policies,
which should be reviewed by Amber Alert coordinators.

  			Total	NWS	NCMEC	State/Local
  	0 sqkm		0	0	0	0
up to	1 sqkm		0	0	0	0
up to	10 sqkm		0	0	0	0
up to	100 sqkm	0	0	0	0
up to	1,000 sqkm	56	49	0	7
up to	10,000 sqkm	325	193	7	125
up to	100,000 sqkm	88	22	55	11
up to	1,000,000 sqkm	109	1	91	17
up to	10,000,000 sqkm	1	0	0	1
  	Subtotal	579	265	153	161

There is a reason why people complain about Amber Alerts more than any 
other type of emergency alert.