Experts Hopeful US Will Soon Piece Together new Early Warning Systems for Emergencies
The U.S. is still attempting to develop more-modern early warning systems for natural disasters -- such as earthquakes -- that use new technologies to reach mobile devices and connected devices within the IoT, experts said Tuesday during a White House summit on earthquake resilience. Panelists were optimistic about the pace of innovation on early warning, and said it's important to rethink the warning process to reach more individuals through mobile technologies, as opposed to traditional radio and TV early alerts.
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David Simpson, FCC Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau chief, said the commission is working to facilitate next-generation 911 capabilities, and the U.S. should "rethink" disaster alerting. "Communications are so important leading up to a disaster, but even more so after a disaster occurs," he said. "We’ve got to rethink alerting if we want to reach the same ears, the same eyeballs that we had traditionally done over broadcast." Simpson said other countries, such as Japan, are ahead of the U.S. in getting out early responses through mobile video, and that "we haven't pulled those pieces together yet."
John Lawson, Convergence Services president, touted the potential of using broadcast airwaves for alerting and for live video, and said it's "just an issue of pulling it together." Lawson said the technology and infrastructure is in place to build on broadcasting and "create a world-class reporting system for the U.S." He said he thinks the U.S. is prepared to take its current system to a whole new level. Lawson also commended the use of radio in emergency response situations, saying it's "still a direct link and will play a big role in emergency response in future years as it does now." Discussing ATSC 3.0, Lawson said broadcast is the future of early alerts and said the traditional cellular network is "fragile," and can be overloaded and physically knocked offline. "Broadcast remains," he said. The ATSC 3.0 technology is "natively mobile" and is "really the key to pervasive, ubiquitous alerting."
Society has become an "on-demand generation" and the early alerting systems should reflect that, said Mike Gerber, National Weather Service emerging dissemination technologies lead. "I think it's important to contrast where we are now to where we think we may be going in the future," he said. Brad Kieserman, American Red Cross vice president-disaster operation and logistics, stressed the importance of early alerts, saying they can completely change the outcome of natural disasters. "The one thing you can’t get back in a disaster is time," he said. "One of the lessons of early warning is that before anybody really does anything, something bad has to happen," and Kieserman said he hopes that doesn't happen with the U.S. He also backed more IoT technologies that can help warn individuals early, before disaster strikes, and said there's a need to minimize human interaction in the face of an earthquake or storm. "The bottom line is this, if you are going to get the decisive life-saving action, you have to understand the culture of the community. The key is, as we shape messages, we need to understand who we are delivering to."