Re: EAS(was Major Power Outage)

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 07:58 PM 8/18/2003, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
>Dan Billings wrote:
>>During the Sox game on Saturday afternoon on the local Fox station, EAS went
>>off with thunderstorm warnings about 10 times in 90 minutes.  The storms
>>were significant, but pretty typical summer thunderstorms.  I think
>>activating the system so frequently will make it harder to get people to pay
>>attention when it really matters.  I assume that the issue is with the
>>station and they could have decided not to run all the messages.
>
>The National Weather Service does tend to get a bit carried away 
>activating the EAS.  I've seen a half dozen activations in a 15-20 minute 
>period.  When we're attended, the jocks at our stations have instructions 
>not to air the NWS alerts, but instead relay the info in their jock 
>talks.  I thought they were getting rid of Perfect PaulŪ, but if so his 
>replacement sounds just as robotic and unintelligible.

Perfect Paul is gone, I believe...he was replaced by Craig and Donna, and I 
think the newest one is Tom.  Tom, IIRC, went online just a few months ago, 
if that long.

NWS doesn't go overboard on activating EAS at all.  The problem is that NWS 
is primarily concerned with weather radios, not with broadcast outlets (for 
obvious reasons).   Weather radios with SAME technology can receive 
extremely specific alerts so NWs is re-issuing alerts county area-by-county 
area using SAME.  But broadcasters usually don't make distinctions with 
SAME...why should they?  Their broadcast area doesn't break down by areas 
within a county (not usually, anyway, certainly not in New England...maybe 
Texas).    So they get all four alerts for one county that are actually 
triggering radios in a specific area at a specific time for folks with 
weather radios in those areas, but for broadcasters it looks like four 
alerts for the same thing.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA