The Reliable Emergency Alert Delivery Integrity (READI) Act would direct the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to improve the performance of the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system, which is a critical public safety tool that allows authorities to send geographically-targeted alerts to cellphones.
Recent disasters have exposed serious flaws in the WEA system, including during the Los Angeles wildfires when an evacuation warning intended for just a few specific neighborhoods, inadvertently went to 10 million residents, causing massive traffic jams, delaying first responders. In other cases, alerts have gone to too few people or weren’t received until hours later.
These failures wear down public trust and render alerting systems less effective. More than 1 in 6 Americans has turned off at least one type of emergency alert. Some emergency managers hesitate to use WEA because they cannot predict how it will perform in their communities. Moreover, even when alerts reach their targets, there can be issues with public comprehension: Most state and local alerts are sent only in English, leaving more than 27 million people in the U.S. unable to act on warnings.
When a flood, fire, or tornado is coming, every minute counts, and precise geographic targeting is needed to create effective alerts. Yet the FCC, the federal body that oversees WEA, does not systematically measure how quickly alerts arrive, whether they reach everyone in the target area, or how many people outside the area receive them. Meanwhile, many individuals may be opting out of emergency alerts altogether due to a lack of understanding of their value, a lack of relevance due to poor geographic targeting or message clarity, or both.
To improve emergency alerts, this bill would require the FCC to set better goals for WEA. Specifically, the bill would direct the FCC to:
- Establish performance metrics and goals for WEA, including around speed, coverage, and geographic targeting;
- Assess enhanced capabilities such as more precise geotargeting, longer alert messages, multilingual alerts, and device compatibility;
- Study the use of advanced translation technologies for multilingual alerts; and
- Require wireless providers to better label emergency alerts and warn users before they opt out of them.
Read the full bill text here.