65 FUTURE SHOCK Weather Alerts
WEATHER WRECKAGE A scene of the devastation that was caused when an EF5 tornado hit Joplin, Missouri
electric grid go down, TV stations remain on the air. “They have rugged towers, which rarely go down, and they have backup power. So if you have a battery- powered device that can receive some kind of signal, you can still get information,” points out Lawson. SOCIAL SCIENCE Lawson explains that research indicates the human response to disaster is often different from what we expect, and recalls the post- mortem studies done on the massive tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri in 2011 and killed 158 people. “There’s a lot of social science that’s been done behind short message alerting, and one thing the science tells us is that it’s really unusual for people to panic during an emergency situation. It does happen, but what typically happens is that people delay. They call it ‘milling’. They get the alert from some source, and then they freeze – one, in order to get confirmation of some kind, and two, to gather more information before they act,” he says. “The classic example is when a smoke alarm goes off in your building. Do you run out, or do you look around and check what other people are doing or try to detect smoke? In Joplin, they trusted their local weather forecaster. With people living in Tornado Alley, that really is a bond. There had been a lot of messaging about tornadic activity in Joplin, then a siren went off that morning and people took shelter, but it turned out to be a false alarm.” Lawson adds: “If you talk to emergency managers, they say the biggest problem in alerting is over-alerting.” Later on that morning, another siren sounded. A tornado with the highest possible power and damage rating, EF5, touched down on the outskirts of Joplin, obliterating everything along a path of six miles. Even among the people who did take shelter, many died. “In the National Academy of Sciences after-accident report, they say they found bodies in the rubble, clutching mobile phones. People were probably trying to stream their local TV station or update the web. They were milling to get more information – and that was possibly fatal to a lot of people,” he says.
get basic information: ‘Where is the shelter? Are the roads open?’ If you could push out that information through other means, the emergency lines would have a better chance of serving the people who need it.” ATSC 3.0 broadcasting will enable very localised programming, significantly boosting the ability to get the right emergency information to the right people. “Your device knows where you are, so it can select the appropriate message from the signal for your location,” Lawson says. In 2017, Santa Barbara County experienced what were (up until then) California’s biggest ever wildfires. That winter, when the rain came, the threat of major mudslides from the now treeless hills became a major threat. One event in Montecito took 23 lives. AWARN began collaborating with a local TV station, which is working with an ATSC 3.0 experimental licence. Together, they created a demo that shows how an immediate evacuation message might work in an ATSC 3.0 framework. They also developed a second use case, which was the presentation of a continuous stream of information that might be available before, during and after an event. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for broadcasters and for the weather service, working together, to offer a whole new emergency information experience service for users,” predicts Lawson.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN ALERTING IS OVER-ALERTING
INDIVIDUALS Lawson explains individuals need a way to dial into the continuous weather alerts and updates of an organisation like the Weather Channel, where IBM’s Watson AI is used to make predictions about the weather. But weather alerts can be an art. There is not always a one-size-fits-all. Too many alerts and people can quickly tune out, too few and the result could be disaster. Lawson cites the case of last autumn’s wildfires around Paradise, California, which killed 67 people, where some residents received intermittent (or no) warnings. This appears to have been due to a limited number of cellular towers and fire damage to the existing towers. “On the other hand, if you evacuate a lot of people and clog the roads with people who don’t need to be evacuated, you prevent help from getting to the people who really need it,” he notes. “You can also have this situation where people flood the emergency phone lines to
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