Without Warning

Just how hard could it be to create an online emergency warning system?

By Sarah D. Scalet

October 10, 2002 — CSO —

Once a week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sends an electronic alert to 36 AM radio stations from Maine to California. Here in New York, an encoder box at a so-called primary entry point at WABC picks up the signal and transmits it to another group of stations, which in turn send it to other stations, until the message spreads to radio, television and cable stations across the country. Observant listeners hear a 10-second squawking soundproof that the station is plugged into the Emergency Broadcast System.

Established in 1963 to let the president take over the airwaves during a national emergency, the system is so apple pie that its surprising that no one really noticed, back in 1994, when it was renamed the Emergency Alert System. (Since then, stations no longer have to recite the script that we all knew as kids: This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.) Although never used by the president, the system is often used for local weather emergencies. Its high-tech, efficient and a little old-fashioned all at once, which is why, after 9/11, Terra Lycos CTO Tim Wright started wondering why there was no such system online.

I cant prevent attacks, but Im sure as hell that we have a very effective way to communicate to large numbers of people real-time on a one-to-one basis, says Wright, whose company operates one of the countrys top five websites. So he helped put together a proposal that described how the technology for an online emergency broadcast system might work, and offered Terra Lycos airwaves to the government for distribution.

The resulting plan is part publicity stunt, part public service. Basically, government agencies like FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control would post relevant information, using XML, to a centralized Web server maintained by the federal government. In an emergency, portals like Terra Lycos, AOL and Yahoo would pull information from the server and post it on their home pagesa system not any different, really, from the hundreds of news feeds that build those sites content every day. The distribution network would prevent bandwidth bottlenecks, and Web users could get information straight from the government, while also drilling down to information as specific as evacuation routes.

Wright met with Homeland Security officials about the proposal last February. He waited for a response. And hes still waiting.

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