Fig. 1: Many broadcasters regularly test the EAS with messages like these
Background on EAS
The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national system that was put into place in 1994 to replace the Emergency Broadcast System. It is jointly administered by the FCC, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Weather Service. The EAS allows radio and television broadcast stations to send emergency information to the public quickly in times of emergency.
On May 31, 2007, the FCC announced it had adopted an order requiring all EAS participants to support CAP (common alerting protocol) in order to facilitate the “efficient and rapid transmission of EAS alerts to the American public in a variety of formats (including text, audio and video) and via different means (broadcast, cable, satellite, and other networks).”
EAS Module Overview
AtHoc’s EAS Activation Module allows emergency management officials, with EAS activation authority, to trigger the national emergency alert system using IWSAlerts’ Web-based alert management system, sending EAS messages over the Internet to broadcasters using the CAP protocol.
The AtHoc IWSAlerts EAS Activation Module includes components that enable CAP-compliance per the FCC order for both the emergency management agencies and the EAS participating broadcasters. As such, emergency management organizations using AtHoc IWSAlerts will be able to trigger EAS systems by transmitting a CAP message that would be received by the broadcaster’s CAP-enabled EAS equipment.
Benefits
- Flexibility to launch an alert to the EAS from any networked computer, local or remote
- Reduced response times to trigger the EAS alert
- Improved messaging consistency and speed of information flow
- Significant reduction of communication cost for activation stations and the broadcasters by using the Internet instead of dedicated satellite/microwave communication channels
- Reaching a larger number of broadcasters and therefore a larger proportion of the public
- Unified notification allows activation of EAS in parallel to other communication means, thereby achieving greater and redundant reach to the public
Key Features
- Web-based activation of EAS from any network-connected workstation within the Emergency Operations Center or from a remote location
- Authenticated and secure Web-based access to multiple operators. The system includes permission management that defines which specific system operators have EAS activation rights
- Preprogrammed selection of EAS scenarios and audio messages that can be distributed as-is or quickly tailored
- Integrated text-to-speech capability which converts text messages to broadcast audio
- Ability to target broadcasters by geographical regions
- Audit trail of all activations with details including operator, time stamp, scenario activated and more
- Delivery of EAS messages over the IP network, including the public Internet, to the EAS ENDEC (Encoder-Decoder) interface, using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)
- Delivery of alerts to broadcasters, online and via print media using additional, non-EAS channels including multi-media desktop alerting that can provide audio, video and more in-depth text information to complement short EAS messages
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