By Megan Lowry

Today, communities across Louisiana and Southeastern coasts are emerging from the shadow of Hurricane Ida. The storm has left New Orleans without power, surrounding areas flooded, and thousands evacuated from their homes.

Since Hurricane Katrina swept through Louisiana almost exactly 16 years ago, the National Academies have helped produce scientific insights and recommendations through initiatives such as the Resilient America Program to help policymakers avoid the worst impacts of future disasters — addressing questions like: How can we improve hurricane prediction? How can cities and states better manage evacuations? How can we make sure the electrical grid is ready for increasingly intense storms?

August 31, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

By: Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience

This handbook companion document supports Public Information and Warnings (AIDR 2021) and provides guidance on the elements of the Australian Warning System.

The role of warnings in a public information and warning context is to provide point-in-time information about a hazard that is impacting or is expected to impact communities. It describes the impact and expected consequences for communities and includes advice on what people should do.

Previously, there have been different warning systems for different hazard types across Australia. The Australian Warning System was adopted by ANZEMC in March 2021 and aims to provide a consistent warnings approach to Australian communities.

The system is a three-level scaled warning system and includes a nationally consistent set of hazard icons for each warning level to show warnings on various publishing platforms (e.g. websites and apps) and provides calls to action. There are icons for cyclone, bushfire, flood, extreme heat, storm, and other. There is a consistent shape and colour scheme, with icons increasing in size as the warning level increases.

Each warning level is to be combined with an action statement to give the community clearer advice about what to do. Calls to action can be used flexibly across all three warning levels and contextualised for each hazard within each state or territory.

The system builds on existing warning frameworks and applies to bushfire, flood, severe storm, cyclone and extreme heat – but is designed to be adaptable and scalable to other hazards.

(AIDR 2021)

By: The National Association of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Following a series of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, that revealed shortcomings in the nation's ability to effectively alert populations at risk, Congress passed the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act in 2006. Today, new technologies such as smart phones and social media platforms offer new ways to communicate with the public, and the information ecosystem is much broader, including additional official channels, such as government social media accounts, opt-in short message service (SMS)-based alerting systems, and reverse 911 systems; less official channels, such as main stream media outlets and weather applications on connected devices; and unofficial channels, such as first person reports via social media. Traditional media have also taken advantage of these new tools, including their own mobile applications to extend their reach of beyond broadcast radio, television, and cable. Furthermore, private companies have begun to take advantage of the large amounts of data about users they possess to detect events and provide alerts and warnings and other hazard-related information to their users.

More than 60 years of research on the public response to alerts and warnings has yielded many insights about how people respond to information that they are at risk and the circumstances under which they are most likely to take appropriate protective action. Some, but not all, of these results have been used to inform the design and operation of alert and warning systems, and new insights continue to emerge. Emergency Alert and Warning Systems reviews the results of past research, considers new possibilities for realizing more effective alert and warning systems, explores how a more effective national alert and warning system might be created and some of the gaps in our present knowledge, and sets forth a research agenda to advance the nation's alert and warning capabilities.

ISBN 978-0-309-46737-7 | DOI 10.17226/24935