Millions of Texans were woken up in the early hours of the morning last fall when a blue alert went out after a police chief was shot in Memphis, Texas.
Officials sent the noisy phone alert out to warn people about a potential criminal on the loose and we know they successfully got the word out because in the days after, the FCC received more than 4,000 complaints.
The ability for officials to warn folks about public safety hazards has become a topic of much discussion in the days after the Central Texas floods.
Drew Fitzgerald is a telecom reporter for the Wall Street Journal who’s been writing about the issues with disaster warnings and he joined the show to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: While The Texas Newsroom was the first to report that some folks did not get emergency alerts on their phones until hours after emergency crews called for it, we’re still learning the details of what happened, but how common are questions like this after hazardous events?
Drew Fitzgerald: Well, it’s a tough one to answer specifically because there are so many kinds of warning systems in the states. There’s TV, there’s radio, wireless, and then just kind of the physical infrastructure like siren towers and highway signs that get the word out.
But when we’ve seen issues, it is often because the infrastructure has failed under the stress of the threat itself, as we’ve seen with wildfires that cut off wireless networks or with the decision-making behind sending out those alerts, which has cropped up in places like California and other states too.
Well, I feel like you were hinting at this, these text message alerts specifically can kind of come from a lot of sources, it seems. Who exactly might be sending them out?
Yeah, there are a lot of overlapping authorities. And when we talk about those specific text message alerts, there are alerts that can go straight to your phone through a list of phone numbers that an authority or even your workplace might have. We’re not talking about those specifically, although Kerr County apparently did use that service to send text messages in the past to a list phone numbers.
But when we’re talking about these alerts that are federally regulated, they sound a warning sound that’s very familiar. It’s the same sound that you hear on the TV or the radio when there’s a natural disaster.
The federal government can send those alerts, including the National Weather Service, over TV and radio and straight to the phone. But state and local authorities can also send their own alerts and they coordinate them through a software system that is essentially coordinated by FEMA.
Well, the [Wall Street] Journal did an analysis of FEMA emergency alert data looking at how many flood warnings were sent out in the Austin-San Antonio area recently. What did you guys find?
We found there were a lot of alerts. In May and June, there were more than a dozen flash flood alerts, and that’s no surprise in the Hill Country because it was spring and there’s been a particularly rainy and dangerous season. So there were a lot of alerts over that time.
Does that get to this idea of alert fatigue, do you think?
It does. RAND, a research organization, did some survey work after an earlier national test, and they found a few interesting things.
One was that Texans opted out of these alerts at the highest rate. You can turn off all the nationwide alerts in your settings, and about 30 percent of people turned off something.
11 percent switched off those imminent threat alerts. And the supposition is that’s because oftentimes people get a lot of alerts – a lot of statewide alerts – that may not apply to them in their particular situation.
Interesting, did they give any recommendations for perhaps tailoring those more specifically? I mean, I guess they’re able to send them where you are right now versus where your phone number is registered, for example.
Yeah, that’s right. There’s a lot of discussion in the government about striking this balance because if you blast the alert too widely, then a lot of people are going to be annoyed by it. It’s not going to be relevant to them and they’ll tune them out.
Well, and folks are thinking of this, it’s top of mind now. If they’re not sure, is this a thing they can check in their settings?
Yes, you can. It varies by manufacturer, but you can go to your phone settings and enable or disable virtually all of the alerts.
There’s national alerts called presidential alerts that aren’t really used that can’t be disabled, but you can go into your settings and the recommendation is to make sure to to switch on imminent threat alerts that might be specifically, for instance, an evacuation order for your area.
