Eric H. Christensen

138 points
User profile image.

Eric started contributing to various open source projects in early 2007. Known in the community as Sparks, he is often seen writing about security and preparedness. His other interests include communication technologies, Cold War history, cartography, and sailing. He maintains the Fedora Security Guide and other publications and software packages for the Fedora Project.

Authored Comments

I used to work in emergency management, knew about the test, and didn't receive the alert. Yep, a "trained" professional who was expecting the alert didn't receive it. Why? Among the reasons you mention are one but another is that the EAS wasn't *fully* utilized during this test.

When I was working for the county EM office one of the things we would try to educate people on is the use of their NOAA All Hazards Radio. These handy, battery-backed up devices are used to not only alert the public (alerts per county) to dangerous weather situations but also to dangerous situations, evacuation orders, and emergency instructions from emergency officials.

The NOAA All-Hazards network is supposed to be part of the nationwide EAS but was not utilized for this test. And like you said, neither was Twitter, identi.ca, or any of the other social media systems.

I've always thought that geographically texting people would be a great idea. The telephone company knows where the phones are so if there is an emergency in area X with a radius of 10 miles, send a message to all those phones saying Y. Seems easy enough, to me.

We have a ways to go...