Public Response to Alerts and Warnings on Mobile Devices Summary of a Workshop on Current Knowledge and Research Gaps (2011) / Chapter Skim
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1 Overview and Context: The Commercial Mobile Alert Service, the Warning Process, and Public Response
1 Overview and Context: The Commercial Mobile Alert Service, the Warning Process, and Public Response
Pages 1-13
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Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) .1 CMAS is currently being developed to provide a national capability to deliver brief text alerts to cellular telephone subscribers.
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Also, the ability to target messages to a cell phone's actual location makes it possible to target more precisely those individuals who would be most at risk in a crisis situation. Cell phones thus seem well positioned to fill gaps in message receipt coverage by traditional systems -- as well as additional gaps that may open up as the reach of traditional broadcast media diminishes.
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5 The recommendations of the CMSAAC appear in its draft report: Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Committee, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) , Commercial Mobile Alert Service Architecture and Requirements, PMG0035, FCC, Washington, D.C., 2007; and in FCC, "Notice of Proposed Rule Making on the Matter of Commercial Mobile Alert System," Public Safety Docket No.
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Cellular broadcast offers two principal advantages over SMS. First, a single broadcast message can reach each active cell phone within range of a given cellular tower, reducing the network capacity required for message delivery compared to
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NOTE: EOC, Emergency Operations Center; FEMA, Federal Emergency Manage ment Agency; NCE, noncommercial educational; PBS, Public Broadcasting Ser vice; DTV, digital television; CMSP, commercial mobile service provider. that required for sending messages to each subscriber.
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It was further observed that the contrast might be even starker if the official information were especially designed to spare network capacity, such as through little or no use of images and other multimedia content. The cumulative effect on network capacity depends on multiple factors, including the relative likelihood of people's using the network either to download official supplemental information or to seek additional information independently, and the respective network capacity consumed by each activity.
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This model takes into account a number of factors associated with the alert or warning, including the source, access to and preferences about communications channels, the message, sender and receiver characteristics, and social and environmental cues, each of which affects how people receive, process, and act on the information. 9 The issuance of an "allclear" message is sometimes considered the final stage of the warning process.
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Ultimately, some citizens will receive the message from multiple sources, but some will not receive the message at all -- and only some recipients of the message will take prompt action. Flash floods exemplify events with such rapid onset that there may not be time for an official warning message to be formu lated and sent.
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Effective Warning Messages For warnings, there is a sizable body of social science research10 on what constitutes effective warning messages, which include the essential elements listed in Box 1.2.11 Other relevant information in addition to the essential elements includes the official actions that have been taken or are in progress, sources of official assistance, and sources for further official information. In contrast, much less is known about effective content for alerts because traditional alert technologies -- such as sirens and weather radio 10 The extensive "Annotated Bibliography for Public Risk Communication on Warnings for Public Protective Actions Response and Public Education" was compiled by Dennis Mileti, Rachel Bandy, Linda B
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Some recent alerting systems, such as the SMS text messages being provided today by many local jurisdictions, are able to provide added content, but because they are new and subscribed to by only a limited subset of the population, there has been relatively little experi ence with their use in disasters and thus fairly little is actually known about how to formulate effective messages. As a result, past research and lessons learned are not fully translatable to the question of what would constitute effective content for CMAS alerts,
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MISCONCEPTIONS AbOuT RESPONSES TO ALERTS AND WARNINgS Classic examples of misconceptions about people's behavior following disasters include the idea that there is looting, price gouging, panic, and role abandonment. Such common assumptions about people's behavior are often at odds with what has been learned from postdisaster research about how people actually behave.
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• Like other capabilities for delivering alerts and warnings, CMAS will have both advantages and limitations. CMAS will allow messages to be geographically targeted with some precision, and it will provide a specific message directly to the public without opportunities for distor tion.
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• Localization of CMAS messages by county or equivalent jurisdic tion might be too coarsegrained, especially in the case of large counties and highly localized events. Some tighter localization may be possible, but this would be constrained by the size of the regions potentially served by individual cellular towers and their overlapping coverage.
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