On (13 Feb 97) Scott Christensen wrote to Bill Newman...
 SC> Bill Newman writes in a message to Matt Smith
 BN> Actually ALL disaster plans have to cover natural and manmade
 BN> disasters and if they do not then they are rejected and have
 BN> to be started all over again. Revisions of disaster plans are
 BN> not a small item.
 SC> Which brings up the new EAS system that will be replacing EBS on your
 SC> radio and TV dial.  Many areas are looking into distributing this
 SC> information via channels in the frequency ranges we all like to scan. 
 SC>   I would suspect that NOAA's channels will come into play
 SC> eventually too.
The change in the name is really not doing anything more than it
did before. The change from the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS)
to the Emergency Alerting System (EAS) is in extent just that a
change in names. What I heard that there was some confusion on
the names and the needs for using the system. Many thought that
it was to be used only in cases of extreme emergency conditions.
As it stands now it can be used to alert of any pending emergency
or weather condition. There is in the works a way to use the
alerting system to activate alert tones in the TV so that even
durning the night the TV will alert to a emergency message. It
will work somewhat like the fire radios do not to alert the men
to a fire call.
The signals and alerts are already on many of the different scan
frequencies now but either special radios are needed to receive
it or people are not listening to the frequency that it is
operating on. This is something that they are working on.
Actually NOAA already transmits an alert signal for weather
alerts and actually that is what the new EAS is mainly going to
do.
... Bill Newman  --  Rochester, NY  --  wtnewman@juno.com
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