Mobile-phone weather alerts left many startled
For the nation's new weather-alert system, Wednesday was a spectacular local debut. The frightening "Severe alert! Flash flood warning" messages certainly caught the attention of mobile-phone users across the region.
For the nation's new weather-alert system, Wednesday was a spectacular local debut. The frightening "Severe alert! Flash flood warning" messages certainly caught the attention of mobile-phone users across the region.
The only problem: Most of the folks who received the warnings that afternoon were in no danger whatsoever.
Philadelphians learned what people in the San Diego region had discovered two days earlier: The alert system has a major technological glitch. Some of the areas warned were far removed from the areas endangered.
"We're still working on that," said Damon Penn, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the lead federal agency in the so-called Commercial Alert Mobile System.
On Wednesday, flood warnings were issued for parts of Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, and Montgomery Counties. Beamed from cell towers, however, the alerts lapped well beyond the targeted areas and into places where the sun was shining.
The system is a joint venture of FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (parent agency of the National Weather Service), and the nation's cellular carriers.
A standard, free feature on many mobile devices sold in the last year or so, the system began operating in April to issue alerts for assorted natural and unnatural disasters. The weather-alert piece went online last month.
The alerts - for floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes - are announced by special ringtones or vibrations. On Wednesday, mobile users were told to "check local media."
"This is a bell-ringer," Penn said, to prompt people to find out exactly what's going on.
On Wednesday, it appeared to prompt people to ask what was going on with their cellphones.
"I'm more freaked out about the fact that my phone knows where I am enough to warn me," one woman said in a Twitter message.
One impetus behind the system is the fact that weather mayhem follows no particular TV-watching schedule. The catastrophic tornado that struck Joplin, Mo., last year hit late on a Sunday afternoon. The derecho wind that ripped through the mid-Atlantic and tore up pieces of Atlantic County howled through the dead of weekend darkness.
Though federal officials don't want anyone ambushed by undetected threats, they are at least as jittery about false alarms that might induce people to stop paying attention to all warnings.
"We're sure we'll be able to home in finer as the time goes on," Penn said.
He added, however, that e warnings shouldn't be too localized. Someone in Philadelphia driving to Camden would want to know whether the Admiral Wilson Boulevard was under water.
"We don't want to inconvenience anyone," he said, but "this is all about saving lives."
