Senators Have Questions for FEMA on Hawaii False Alert

Questions about the origination of the recent false missile alert in Hawaii should be answered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency rather than the FCC, said FCC Public Safety Bureau Chief Lisa Fowlkes and several senators at a Commerce Committee hearing Thursday (see 1801240046), which FEMA officials didn't attend, despite being invited.

Senators at the hearing questioned the level of emergency alerting responsibility assigned to local officials, discussed the possibility of giving the FCC more oversight over alerting, and what Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, called “inherent flaws in the system. “I do wish that FEMA had been here, I think they would have been an integral part of this discussion,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. “We are not involved in any way in determining who issues what alert,” said Fowlkes in response to legislator questions. “In terms of this specific incident I would have to refer you” to FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, she said.

Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune, R-S.D, said FEMA was invited to attend the hearing but FEMA officials said they needed more “lead time.” FEMA is expected to attend a second Senate Commerce hearing to be held in Hawaii, though that meeting doesn’t yet have a date, Thune said. FEMA briefed a bipartisan group of Senate Commerce staff last week at the committee’s request, a FEMA spokeswoman said in response to questions about the agency’s nonattendance. FEMA “will continue to remain engaged with this committee, and others, who have a responsibility to conduct oversight on this important matter,” the spokeswoman said. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee has jurisdiction over FEMA, according to that committee's website.

The FCC oversees the distribution of alerts through carriers and broadcasters rather than alert originators, Fowlkes told the committee. Wireless providers and broadcasters don’t exercise discretion over the alerts they pass on, said NAB Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny and CTIA Senior Vice President-Regulatory Affairs Scott Bergmann. Asked by Thune if the FCC has the tools to prevent incidents like the one in Hawaii from happening again, Fowlkes said the agency doesn't. Though FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security do oversee some aspects of alert origination, much of it is also delegated to state and local public safety agencies, said Ed Czarnecki, senior director-strategic and government affairs for EAS vendor Monroe Electronics, in an interview.

The role of local authorities in emergency alerts was a focus of comments from Schatz, who, along with Thune, questioned why a local official would have the power to trigger a ballistic missile warning. Such alerts ought to be the purview of a federal agency or possibly the White House, Schatz said. “A missile attack is federal, a missile is not a local responsibility,” Schatz said. Incoming missiles should be presidential level alerts, he said. State alerting officials aren’t missile experts and the more of them involved the bigger chance for a mistake, Schatz said. Using the presidential emergency alert likely would involve looping in the White House into the alerting process along with the DOD and FEMA, which could add additional complications, Czarnecki told us.

Thune and Schatz both repeatedly raised the possibility that the FCC might need more authority to provide oversight over emergency alerting. Schatz asked if the FCC needed more authority to ensure that emergency alerts are disseminated to cord cutters watching streaming services, and Thune asked Fowlkes if she believes there should be changes in the rules on oversight over alert origination. Fowlkes said she couldn’t comment on that, but the FCC would be ready to provide technical assistance to new legislation.

The FCC’s investigation into the Hawaii incident is ongoing, but Fowlkes said it appears to have been the result of “simple human error,” and the state didn’t have sufficient safeguards in place. Hawaii is working with vendors to institute safeguards that would require multiple sign-offs to prevent future incidents. Fowlkes said she's pleased with the level of cooperation from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, except for “one key employee” -- the person who transmitted the false alert. That person is refusing to cooperate, Fowlkes said. She told the committee the FCC also would look into the matter of alerting cord-cutters, communications difficulties that arose among government officials during the Hawaii incident, and issues with emergency alerts for a recent tsunami threat in Alaska.

Ranking member Bill Nelson, D-Fla, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said the Hawaii incident highlights the need to repair the aging 911 infrastructure (see 1801250048), and several senators pointed to the need for the public to receive wireless emergency alerts as a reason to emphasize rural wireless coverage. “Public confidence in WEA must be a priority,” Bergmann said. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said a 2019 deadline on expanding the number of characters in WEA messages should be moved up to 2018, but Bergmann wouldn’t agree the industry would be able do so earlier than 2019. “I wouldn’t want to get ahead of the current deadline,” he said.

The Hawaii incident did demonstrate that the distribution side of the emergency alerting system works well, said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Bergmann and Matheny. The false alarm was “a fascinating test case,” showing that the system worked exactly as planned in disseminating a warning, she said. “That piece of the process worked,” Matheny said. He urged the committee to support broadcaster ability to propagate EAS messages by adding more funding to the post-incentive auction repack reimbursement fund, preventing regulatory hurdles to ATSC 3.0, and supporting the activation of FM chips in smartphones.