This is the first in a series delving into specific proposals in the Federal Communication Commission’s further notice of proposed rulemaking (FNPRM), which is intended to improve the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts. The commission is now taking public comments on these proposals.
It’s a common gripe in the emergency alerting community: People can get fatigued when they receive too many alerts, so they may ignore EAS and WEA messages when it counts.
One way to fight this is to make sure alerts are only issued to relevant areas.
So the FCC is considering a plan to encourage more use of EAS geotargeting.
The commission is proposing to allow stations and other EAS participants to take advantage of detailed location information that is often available in CAP EAS messages.
“Because EAS participants are currently restricted to targeting alerts by using county codes, it can be difficult for them to identify alerts that are targeted to very small geographic areas,” it states in the FNPRM.
“Even if they could identify these situations, EAS participants transmit EAS alerts to facilities’ entire service areas, which are often large.”
The FCC says alerting authorities and equipment manufacturers feel that EAS is underutilized because of these limited geotargeting capabilities.
“For example, during the January 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires, alerting authorities did not use EAS to transmit evacuation orders to avoid delivering the alert to people for whom it was not intended, which could have caused unnecessary panic and potentially moved people into — rather than out of — harm’s way,” it wrote.
Emergency managers have told the commission they’d like to see geotargeting capabilities for EAS similar to those used for WEA phone alerts.
One county told the FCC, “Currently sending an EAS in our area would alert six counties, theoretically reaching over 8,000 square miles and 4.5 million people. This is far too broad for any practical purpose.”
The FCC notes that many CAP EAS messages include WEA-supported circles or polygons in addition to county codes. “We believe that the most immediate approach to improving EAS geotargeting would be to allow EAS participants to use those circles and polygons as an alternative to county codes.”
It believes this approach will allow participants to more precisely identify the geographic area to which a CAP EAS alert is relevant and be better informed as to whether it makes sense to transmit the alert.
“This helps EAS participants strike a balance between transmitting EAS messages to affected communities while minimizing the deleterious effects of alert fatigue.”
The FCC sets out a list of questions about the proposal (you can read them here in paragraph 70 on page 40).
For instance it wants to know if broadcasters and other EAS participants are interested in the idea; whether the idea could lead to deployment of new capabilities to make alerts more accurate; whether manufacturers believe that there is sufficient interest to financially justify bringing those capabilities to market; and whether the changes would provide enough flexibility to participants that may want to consider using the coordinates in a CAP message to determine whether to broadcast an EAS alert.
The commission also asks whether it should require, rather than just allow, this use of circles and polygons when targeting alerts.
New EAS location codes
Another change would give the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau the authority to adopt new EAS location codes to make messages more understandable to communities. (It is described in paragraph 73.)
The FCC said the National Weather Service feels that existing location names can be potentially confusing or misleading.
“For example, in Monroe County, Florida the ‘southwest’ subcounty code might be used for alerts relevant to Key West. People in Key West, however, would be confused by an EAS message that described the target area as ‘Southwest Monroe County’ because they may not associate that description with Key West.”
Names could be encoded and transmitted in legacy EAS messages with combinations of EAS location codes that are not currently being used. The code for Monroe County is “12087,” but the code “12088” is unused and could be assigned to “Key West” for EAS purposes.
The FCC thinks this idea will provide authorities with a more flexible list of locations for targeting alerts.
“More commonly used location names would be less likely to confuse alert recipients about whether an alert is intended for them and would likely provide greater certainty about whether a received alert is intended for the recipient.”
If this change is adopted, alerting authorities and State Emergency Communications Committees could ask the bureau to create a code for a particular location, explaining the need and providing a map with a circle or polygon to identify the relevant area. The bureau would take public comment and decide.
Again the FCC asks for public comment about this idea, and asks questions, such as: “Should we consider an alternative technical implementation, such as expanding the county subdivision character of six-digit geocodes to allow the use of letters, which could then be assigned to specific locations? Are there more effective ways to reduce consumer confusion about the locations to which EAS messages are targeted that we should consider?”
There are numerous other proposals in the further notice on topics such as allowing software-based EAS; securing EAS through message authentication; preventing duplicate alerts through a universal identifier; strengthening WEA geotargeting; and promoting the use of symbols for alerts.
Comments about the FNPRM are due Aug. 31 and replies are due Sept. 29. You can file here. Comments should refer to PS Dockets 25-224, 15-94 and 15-91.
