I assume this is something FEMA wants to do to show that the system works just fine in light of that false alarm in Hawaii earlier this year.
The primary stated purpose of the Emergency Alert System is to make it possible for the president to directly address the entire nation on ten minutes notice.
The first national test of an Emergency Action Notification on radio and TV wasn’t until 2011, 48 years after the Emergency Broadcast (now Alert) System was created.
He probably just found out that he can do this. Possibly it was mentioned on a flip chart entry for the new system in a daily briefing he actually attended, so now he wants to play with it, like when he found out about presidential pardons and had to pardon some people. (I hope Manafort isn’t counting too much on a pardon - I think Trump got bored with that and doesn’t want to play with it any more.)
All those so inclined, send up a prayer for whatever poor schlub is trying to negotiate the contents of this message with President Trump. It must be an incredibly difficult job.
Who wants to bet that he wastes two of his precious 90 characters to include his middle initial?
“This is President Donald J. Trump, President of the United States . . .” leaving less than forty characters for an actual message.
The thing is, that we SHOULD be able to have such an alert system. It SHOULD be a good idea. We SHOULD have elected a President who could be trusted to treat this with gravitas.
But we didn’t.
**“My fellow Americans. I, President of the United States Donald Trump, am addressing you at this time of nation”
“What do you mean you cut me off? I’m Donald Trump. You don’t me off. I cut you off. You’re an Obama holdover, I ca”
“90 character limit? Whose idea was that? I am Donald Trump and my people want to hear all of my tremendous spee”
“Okay, I’ll stick to the prepared text. I said I would, didn’t I? So stop telling me what to do. I’m the President of the Un”**
“Donald Trump here. Big rock coming. I’m okay. Blame Obama. Vote for Trump in 2020. See? I told you I could do it righ”
OK now I’ve had a chance to chill a bit and yeah, sure, it’s ***the notion that it’s &^%$ Trump ***who will make first use of this feature that got me (and others) especially riled up.
But even so there’s still the questions of (a) exactly how, if there’s an emergency so dire the POTUS has to *personally tell us himself *on 10 minutes’ notice, telling us personally, himself on 10 minutes’ notice helps at all and (b) how come nobody has full-up tested the “Presidential Alert” in all these years. I suppose this last could be answered in that it is the same alert system only originating at POTUS rather than at the regional EAS centers so the POTUS-to-EAS side and the EAS-to-public side could have been tested separately and it is just a question of patching through a channel, and the prior presidents knew that doing it in the open would annoy the public and lend itself to these reactions.
Why? What else am I going to? Panic? Try to evacuate with all the others so that I die in my car instead of my home?
Sitting on my sofa next to my husband, with a cat on my lap, a glass of cognac by my side, watching Counterpart – sounds like as good a way to go out as any.
I don’t believe in god or an afterlife, so if death is certain, what’s the advantage of having my last ten minutes consumed in fear and panic?
Netflix and overkill?
I certainly understand the need for a system, and the capability for local emergency services managers to target messages as needed.
While I was working at the 9-1-1 center in the Cayman Islands there was a fire in one of the main storage tanks at the primary fuel depot for the island. When it was built that depot was out of town but neighborhoods have since been built around it.
During the fire our 9-1-1 center was relegated to having police officers go door-to-door to inform people of the fire and the need to evacuate. Though local radio and television did broadcast a message, the ability to send an emergency alert to cell phones would have been an exceptionally good way to target the message. Sending a text to every phone in range of a certain cell tower would have gotten the word out a lot faster.
Scaling that up to a nationwide alert system in the United States would inherently mean that the message would need to be relevant nationwide. So short of a nuclear missile attack or an incoming asteroid I expect the system will go unused except for rare tests.
And what if the administration feels a need to respond to some catagory 7 fake news?
That wouldn’t be a national emergency and FEMA wouldn’t send such a message.
Yes, these have always been good questions about the Emergency Broadcast/Alert System. It’s always been a little…theoretical that a national alert would actually be of use in the massive disaster it was meant for. Early warning was obliterated when they figured out how to put missiles on submarines, and after the fact there might not be enough communications infrastructure left.
Although it wouldn’t necessarily be the president telling us personally himself. He just authorizes it. He might use it to send a message to the American people, but he might just authorize its use as a source of information from the central government.
And if FEMA is the one making the decision, then there’s no reason for the President to be involved at all. That the president is involved implies that he has at least some decision making power, given that he is above FEMA in the hierarchy.
Either the president is important and we need him to be able to contact us in case of an emergency, or the president isn’t important and FEMA could contact us in case of an emergency, without wasting time contacting the president.
I support having a channel to contact all Americans in case of a dire emergency. It would be the same one used for local emergencies, but just activating all local emergency channels at once. I just don’t see any reason for that to need to be held by the president.
Even without Trump being the one in charge, it seems the President, who is the furthest from the chain of the experts finding the problem, is the worst person to pull in. If there’s really a timely emergency, the people in charge of asserting threats need to be the ones contacting us.
We don’t need the bureaucratic inefficiency of contacting the president (or his administration) to write up the response to then have it verified by FEMA.
They’re SMSs, so you still actually get them when you turn it back on.
Having it be an actual phone call wouldn’t make sense. Lots of people don’t even take the call if they don’t recognize the number. And what happens if someone is already on the phone; like, say, a four year old on the phone with Emergencies because his mother is nonresponsive? SMSs are the method of choice for government messages because they’re cheap and because everybody who’s got a cell gets them; even if the phone was off.
Everyone I know has Amber Alert notifications turned off. They’re near useless.
But I think people are getting all worked up over nothing. it’s a good idea to have a system like this in place. And, in a perfect world, it would never get used. Alien invasion, asteroid strike, nucular confrontation with the russkies are the times it should be used. That’s about it.
When trump starts sending daily propaganda, THEN you can get upset.
Whose bright idea was it to name this thing a “Presidential Alert”? Did it not occur to them that, with the current iDJiT in charge, that name would make people assume it would be abused to whip up fake panics to distract from the iDJiT’s legal and political problems?
I was until I got my first one. 3am on a weekday morning about a vehicle in Yuma (200 miles away).
Yes, sir! I’ll put on my robe and flip flops so’s I can shuffle to the end of the driveway and peer up and down the street.
I told my sons about this so they would know what was happening when the message showed up on their phones. They are both in high school and they are now looking forward to all of the phones in their classrooms going off at the same time.
:dubious: