Leave No One Behind Global Lessons for Implementing an Effective Public Warning System

White Paper 2

Leave no one behind Global lessons for implementing an effective Public Warning System

March 2020

This White Paper follows on from our first, titled “Getting it right first time”, published by Public Safety Communications Europe (PSCE) in March 2019: https://www.psc- europe.eu/white-papers/psce-white-paper-12-implementing-reverse-112/download.html

Leave no one behind

When media commentators worldwide are regularly using the term “unprecedented” to describe manmade and natural hazards, it is not surprising that governments are looking to implement an effective Public Warning System (PWS). The global Coronavirus Pandemic is a prime example of the need for an effective national PWS. In December 2018, the European Council passed legislation that expects Member States to have in place their PWS by June 2022. Whilst Article 110, European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) is a “Directive”, the text uses the word “should” throughout to reflect that it does not have the mandate to compel Member States to act. Nevertheless, authorities across Europe are actively exploring how to achieve an effective and compliant PWS. However, effectiveness goes beyond technologies alone. Of greater importance is that the PWS meets the community safety outcomes expected and the functional and operational requirements of its user-authorities. This paper explains how we can achieve both operational and technical effectiveness by optimising the investment in a future-proofed all hazards, all agencies PWS.

I am the former Emergency Services Commissioner for Victoria, Australia, and National Director of Australia’s “Emergency Alert Program” (2011 to 2015). In 2012, I oversaw implementation of Australia’s “Location Based Solution (LBS)” as Phase 2 of the national PWS programme known as “Emergency Alert (EA)” - “EA-LBS”1. At its core, is a technology platform powered by Location Based SMS (LBSMS). Two years after its launch, I commissioned a nationwide survey of the communities across the country who had received an alert and the Emergency Services Organisations (ESOs) that sent them. The resulting 129-page review provides important lessons for successful implementation and continuous improvement. These, along with my own leadership experiences offer a unique evidence- base to help guide both the design and operational use of an effective PWS.

Since that launch just over seven years ago, EA-LBS has proved highly effective at reaching close to everyone with a mobile phone in the affected area. Australia’s system is accessible automatically to 100% of mobile phone users the moment their device connects to a network. Hence it is inclusive equally both to citizens and international roamers. Overall, throughout more than 1,500 activations since 2012, its 15 million SMS messages have reached in excess of 97% of the mobiles in the warning area. To bust the first myth about LBSMS, it does so without congesting the networks. The other 3% were made up, primarily, by devices that connect to the networks but cannot receive SMS, such as early model tablets. Today, with the capability to filter out non-mobile telephone handsets, access and reach will be much closer to 100%. When countries with a Cell Broadcast (CB) PWS reach less than 80%2, due to ongoing worldwide handset incompatibility issues, you will understand my objective in showing authorities the actual facts and risks they must consider when designing an effective PWS.

1 EA-LBS was developed by a consortium of suppliers that included Mobilaris and Genasys and managed by Telstra. The platform upgrade for Phase 4, to be launched in 2021, will be supplied by Everbridge. Genasys, amongst other suppliers, is bidding to renew the interfaces between the MNOs and the EA-LBS platform. 2 Canada: “Alert Ready” – only available to compatible 4G handsets when within 4G coverage = less than 60% of mobile phone users. New Zealand: “Emergency Mobile Alert” – target reach is 70% of mobile phone users. The first national test in November 2017 reached 34% of mobile phone users and another 15% of the population, who were near someone who did. The Netherlands: “NL Alert” – December 2019 test indicated 78% reach.

Throughout 2019 and now in 2020, together with Public Safety Communications Europe (PSCE), I am facilitating a series of workshops for authorities to collaborate on the design to delivery of an effective PWS. The events are also sponsored by some of the world’s leading suppliers3 of PWS technologies. The latter are focused on the digital innovations they can deliver to help authorities better protect communities for the enduring and emerging hazards we face. Our collective purpose is to demystify and thereby accelerate the implementation process to meet the EECC June 2022 deadline. Wherever possible, we are also keen to leverage the economies of scale and cross-border interoperability provided by multi-state collaboration. The following paragraphs outline what we have learned so far from these workshops; in particular the overriding principle that the PWS should leave no one behind. 1. Much has been written about PWS technologies, mostly by technology standard-setters. All too often they begin with what their technologies can do rather than start with the emergency services’ and civil protection agencies’ Concept of Operations. These deal with why, when, for what, who and how they will actually use this life-saving capability. Of fundamental importance is that use of the PWS must fulfil the public safety expectations of the community it is aimed at protecting. To summarise, for the PWS to be truly effective, the critical success factors against which to measure the design are that it satisfies: • the multi-dimensional natural and manmade threats affecting each nation; • the operational requirements of the user-authorities and their emergency management arrangements; • the statutory duty of these authorities to warn and inform the community about imminent and actual emergencies; • the needs and expectations of the community for how they want to be alerted, • and the content of the message, so the public recognise and understand immediately its authenticity and the action(s) authorities need them to take to protect their safety.

2. The problem faced by authorities today is how, given the prominence of social media and fake news/misinformation, they can implement an effective PWS. As stated, the first step is determining the Concept of Operations. The objective is a multi-channel PWS platform that enables all user-authorities: (i) To provide inclusive, timely, trusted warnings and information relevant to the public in the geographic area affected, and (ii) Gain situational awareness automatically through remote, near real-time access to the data generated from the incident ground back to the PWS platform to visualise the human impacts of their actions.

3. Therefore, one of the fundamental lessons identified from our European workshops is that authorities want a PWS that maximises their investment by going beyond just broadcasting the alert. It has to be a multi-channel platform that enables the emergency services both to warn the public and visualise remotely at the Incident Control Centre what is happening on the ground. The PWS needs to give Incident Commanders and Controllers near real-time intelligence4 to make sense of cause and effect. Consequently, they can make more meaningful decisions about how to protect the public. For example, they want the PWS to help them identify: • The number of people in the area affected (from the number of mobile phones); • Whether they can be reached with an alert on their device;

3 Ericsson, Everbridge, Gedicom, Genasys, Intersec, Mobilaris, and Opencode. 4 In this context, “intelligence” means information designed for action.

• Their nationalities; • Whether they received the alert and are now acting on its instructions; • Where the people are who cannot escape and now need rescuing, and • The resources needed to achieve that.

4. In addition, post-incident, they want the data generated by the PWS to help them reconstruct events in order to satisfy the public’s expectations that the emergency services responded effectively. It is commonplace in Australia for members of the public to enquire why they may not have received an alert. Because EA-LBS processes the data needed to answer this, it is possible for the authorities to give a definitive response very quickly. Hence, the PWS has an innate community assurance capability built into it. As regards system security, to bust another myth about LBSMS, there is no evidence of EA-LBS (and its equivalents in other countries) being either hacked or spoofed.

5. Authorities may also want the PWS to initiate two-way communication. This can be achieved with SMS, whereby authorities can embed in the message the capability for the recipient to respond either by SMS or pressing specific numbers on their keypad, such as: 1 = “Message received, and I am acting on the instruction”, or 2 = “Message received, but I need help”. Emergency services can control these to limit inappropriate/malicious responses. Authorities can also embed links in the SMS to official websites and social media channels, and a telephone number to connect with the Operations Centre.

6. In the context of the Coronavirus, health authorities can use the PWS to enable the public to provide daily status updates by responding to the SMS request using a simple 1 to 5 reply for whichever is most relevant to their situation. For example: 1 = “At home - no symptoms” 2 = “At work or travelling to/from - no symptoms” 3 = “At home - self-isolating due to me or someone in my household/workplace having symptoms” 4 = “Out shopping for essentials” 5 = “Out for my daily exercise”. This automated reporting and remote monitoring would save the police from having to physically visit every street to check on compliance across the community. Instead, they can focus on any anomalies in the response data that indicate a breach of the local lockdown restrictions. Analysis of the responses would also help the health authorities gain a far more accurate picture of the extent of infection in each geographically defined area.

7. Since it is the authorities who will be accountable for how they use the PWS, the emergency services and civil protection agencies entrusted with public safety must, at chief officer level, lead and be responsible for the project to design and implement the PWS. The essential outcome is an effective all hazards, all agencies community alerting and situational awareness capability. Evidence shows that, if left principally to the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), Regulators and some Technology Suppliers, as happened largely in the USA, New Zealand and Canada, the design is unlikely to do so.

8. Lessons from multiple countries that have implemented a PWS already are that the emergency services will quickly recognise its value for multiple scenarios beyond those originally foreseen, and very rapidly increase its use. For example, whilst Australia’s “Emergency Alert” was designed initially as a mass-population warning capability for immediate threats from wide-area flooding and wildfires, ESOs very quickly employed it for more localised incidents. The latter can include, active shooters, marauding terrorist attacks, structural fires, gas leaks, water contamination, and missing children. All it takes is for one Incident Controller to recognise the immediate value of the PWS to help save life, and the Concept of Operations will change and evolve continually thereafter. For example, in Australia, the decision in 2014 to use EA-LBS successfully for a high- risk missing/abducted child altered how the PWS is now used nationwide. Today, ESOs activate the PWS for any emergency where it can be shown it will make a difference to their decisions (including risks and liabilities) about saving life. Consequently, getting the design right from the start as a multi-purpose capability is absolutely essential. This is why, to maximise the investment, the PWS must go beyond being just a “broadcast and forget” alerting tool.

9. At the start of 2020, who would have thought of the PWS being used for a global health emergency such as the Coronavirus. With the PWS configured correctly, health authorities can use the single unified platform as a one-stop capability to enable critical actions that can include (see also section 20 on page 8): (i) Utilise “Traveller Alerts” to identify how many of their nationals have a home-country mobile phone registering in each foreign country affected, and to then send them by SMS advice on actions; in-country diplomatic, health, travel and support services, and where to get more information. (ii) Use the “Welcome SMS” to provide every international visitor, when their mobile first connects to a host MNO network (and thereafter), with the government’s advice and updates on how to stay healthy; where to get more information, and what action to take if they become infected, including how to contact the public health authority. (iii) Utilise LBSMS to identify how many people are in a specific area affected; send them a tailored alert with relevant advice, and use the two-way communication feature (mentioned in section 6 previously) to report on their status. (iv) Use geofencing to alert mobile phone users when they enter an area affected to provide them with advice on the local restrictions. (v) Process the subscriber metadata stored historically (where the PWS is configured to do so) to reconstruct events to identify the mobile phones for people who may have been in contact with an affected person and send them tailored advice.

10. At its core, the PWS has to deliver an intrusive alert message using mobile telephony. That’s because, every day, around 95% of us either carry a mobile phone or are near someone who does. In this way, the PWS platform has the potential to reach everyone in a crisis. In some instances, the PWS will be the only way for the emergency services to reach the people to alert them quickly to a threat. For example, in Australia, the scale and number of simultaneous bushfires can exceed the capacity and capability of the ESOs to attend every incident. EA-LBS has repeatedly proved itself highly effective at providing an essential automated “door-knocking” capability. Because it uses SMS, the data generated by the MNOs provides the ESOs with essential near real-time intelligence about the human impacts from the incident ground. This helps authorities better manage risk remotely at the Control Centre.

11. Lessons from the 7 February 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires in Victoria, Australia powerfully illustrate the importance of getting the information to everyone affected. The fires killed 173 people. Afterwards, three communities fought for compensation from the power companies (for not maintaining their cables - seen as a cause) and the emergency services for a perceived “failure to warn” on the day. In 2015, the state government (and power companies) settled the class action in a total pay-out of $794 million (AUD); equivalent then to 600 million Euros. Those experiences reinforce that, to be fully effective, the PWS must also enable the emergency services to achieve their statutory duty to warn and inform everyone.

12. One of the recommendations of the subsequent Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was implementation of a national PWS capable of reaching everyone with a mobile phone. My office, the Office of the Emergency Services Commissioner (OESC) for the state of Victoria, led for Australia the design to delivery of the resulting EA-LBS. From the start, we based the programme on a series of ten “Guiding Principles” as the benchmarks against which to measure effectiveness in terms of: (i) community safety outcomes, and (ii) operational benefits. The top five are equally vital to every country building a PWS today as the non-technical benchmarks critical to choosing the right technology(ies) for the PWS platform. They are that, as a minimum, it must be: • Non-discriminatory: accessible to and reaches the “vast majority”5 of mobile phone users automatically, without configuring their handset, regardless of their choice of mobile phone or MNO, and available equally to all citizens and visitors roaming on the national networks; • Automatic opt-in: free, without registration or subscription; • Only the mobile-user can choose to opt out either by switching off their phone or ignoring the alert; • Intrusive alert: the handset responds to the alert either with an automated sound or a tone and/or vibration cadence chosen by the user, and • Auditable: enabling the system operator to visualise on screen, in near real-time how many mobile phones (people) are within the warning area; whether the alert message reached them successfully, and the human impacts that result.

13. Article 110 and Recitals 293, 294 and 295, of the EECC govern the design for an effective PWS. Article 110(1) promotes a PWS enabled by mobile telephony. Article 110(2) allows for alternative technologies provided their effectiveness is the same as mobile telephony. To assist with their approach to the PWS design, our practitioner workshops focus on the critical non-technical aspects towards getting it right first time: 1. Concept of Operations – statutory duty to warn the public, in what circumstances, for what purposes, and how; 2. Operational and functional requirements of the user authorities to enable them to achieve their objectives to protect lives and minimise harm; 3. Governance, policy, regulation, (non-technical) standards, and funding options to secure Ministerial sign-off ahead of procurement;

5 We quantified “vast majority” as not less than 95% of mobile phone users within network coverage of the warning area. EA-LBS achieves more than this every time.

4. Operational readiness of the user authorities - systems and procedural integration and training to be documented in the Standard Operating Procedures, and 5. Community education and preparation – multi-media promotional materials for school children to senior citizens, including international visitors. This all helps to ensure that, for the procurement process, project teams have the outcomes-driven benchmarks they need against which to then evaluate available technologies for effectiveness.

14. In June 2020, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) will publish their Guidelines for evaluating an effective PWS to comply with the EECC. The December 2019 draft of this document took no account of either the operational requirements or community expectations of such a system. Along with many emergency management practitioners, I hope to convince BEREC to now include these essential non-technical benchmarks in the final publication. To focus simply on the effectiveness of technologies misses the more critical point of whether the PWS delivers the requirements of its multi-agency user-authorities. BEREC does make the critical point, though, that the PWS should act as a gateway to multi-channel communications.

15. One of the reasons for challenging BEREC is that, as the EECC explains, to be effective the PWS should reach “all” mobile phone users within the geographically defined area of an imminent or actual emergency. The legislation does not provide for a lesser standard than everyone. However, today the draft BEREC Guidelines are silent about this fundamental requirement. By way of example, the Metropolitan Police Service (London, UK) also recognises the importance of inclusivity with their statement, “Our mission is keeping London safe for everyone”. When their official Twitter channel, “@metpoliceuk”, can reach only its 1.2 million followers, and the population of London exceeds 9 million, it is essential that the police actively engage in developing a fully inclusive PWS.

16. Another important point is to bust the myths about PWS technology standards. This is because some suppliers use these to influence the design of national systems, without declaring openly the functional limitations that these standards promote. The principal international mobile telephony standard-setting organisations, 3GPP6 and ETSI7, have amongst their members the very CB technology suppliers that, not surprisingly, their standards favour! To try and outmanoeuvre the competition, the standard-setters choose repeatedly to either ignore or discredit evidence from many countries that already use the alternative LBSMS. Thus, governments procuring a PWS technology should not be swayed by 3GPP and ETSI technical standards alone. Instead, national PWS project teams need to follow the first rule of operational transformation, which is to ask the people at the frontline of a crisis (the community and emergency services), “Will this work for you?”

17. Before you think this is going to be another ideological debate about whether CB is better than LBSMS, let me give you the facts. As stated in the “Public Warning System Update”, published in 2019 by the European Emergency Number Association (EENA), no one technology can meet the expectation that the PWS will reach everyone. For the

6 3GPP: Third Generation Partnership Project 7 ETSI: European Telecommunications Standards Institute

optimal PWS, you need to have a multi-channel hybrid that has mobile telephony at its core. Potentially, this should incorporate both CB and LBSMS: • CB for its intrusive fast alerting capability, and • LBSMS for its access to near real-time data for situational awareness. By way of example, as well as LBSMS, one leading provider of PWS platforms (Everbridge) offers “Advanced CB” capabilities. This enables authorities both to alert via CB and see how many mobile phone-users are within coverage of the affected area using LBSMS (without necessarily also using the latter for the alert).

18. For its greater speed of delivery, at tens of thousands of messages per second, CB is far better suited to the in-extremis, large-scale event, with minimal time to impact, such as a tsunami, tornado or incoming rocket attack. In China, it is being used effectively to warn the population of the COVID-19 quarantine areas. These events require a fast, mass population alert for, potentially, a million people or more. Speed of delivery and best endeavours to get the message broadcast to the many will be far more important than universal access/reach and all the other additional features provided by LBSMS. After all, the PWS is a community information and warning system. It has an implied social responsibility that those who do receive an alert will share it with others who may not. However, whilst that might be so during the waking hours, it may not be at night. That is why Australia determined the ESOs needed a PWS that was automatically accessible to and could reach every mobile telephone handset.

19. Countries that have implemented a CB PWS chose to do so based on the most likely operational use-cases for its activation. “RO Alert” in Romania (developed by Opencode) is one such system. For these, system assurance is achieved by automated acknowledgement from each MNO that it broadcast the message from its cellsites covering the warning area. Authorities can also ask the public afterwards to complete a manual survey on where they were and whether or not they each received the alert. This is certainly how New Zealand manages public assurance, as their CB “Emergency Mobile Alert” (developed by One to Many) has no automated human-impact audit functionality. Similarly, authorities in Canada and USA rely on post-event questionnaires to estimate the performance of their CB PWS.

20. By comparison, LBSMS can still deliver thousands of SMS per second to reach, potentially, a million or more in slower time. For example, to assist with crowd safety during the annual Hajj in Mecca, the capacity of both the PWS (“Community Information and Warning System” developed by Mobilaris) and SMS Centres means authorities in the city can routinely send over 4 million SMS in each campaign. Nevertheless, LBSMS is operationally better suited to regional and more localised incidents affecting thousands of people.

21. In addition to the benefits of universal access and reach, the principal difference with LBSMS is that it needs to process simultaneously the subscriber metadata from each MNO for every device registering within network coverage of the warning area. A quick but important point to make here is that the EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), amongst other EU legislation, permit authorities to lawfully process data without the subject’s consent for the purposes of saving life and/or the emergency services carrying out their duties8. The PWS platform aggregates and anonymises the

8 The national legislation that enabled GDPR needs to be amended to state the purposes for which authorities will use the PWS; the types of data that will be processed, and the safeguards to protect it.

metadata to display it as totals and heatmaps on screen to the authorised user. This means the LBSMS PWS has the added advantages of giving its users, in near real-time, depersonalised data generated remotely from the incident ground. This is absolutely essential to situational authority for the full “Emergency Lifecycle”. The latter has four distinct stages, and an effective PWS has to meet the demands of each: 1. Preparation: in May 2019, authorities in Odisha along the eastern flank of India used their multi-channel PWS platform, that has LBSMS at its core, for the first time to send 2.3 million SMS messages to warn of Cyclone Fani. This action dramatically reduced the loss of life compared to previous cyclones. 2. Alerting: throughout the 2019/20 bushfires in Australia, ESOs used EA-LBS repeatedly to send alerts tailored specifically to the community affected and received the data back to understand the human impacts. 3. Response: authorities in Belgium (“BE-Alert” developed by Gedicom) and Iceland (“112 Iceland” developed by Everbridge) use their PWS (LBSMS) also to identify in near real-time: • From handset registrations on the networks, how many mobile phone users: o are within coverage of the area affected; o received the alert SMS successfully and, if not, the failure reason; o reacted correctly to the warning message; e.g. evacuating the area, and o are left behind who need rescuing and their locations. • From the (IMEI) equipment identifier, they filter out all mobile devices that cannot receive SMS, and • From the (SIM - IMSI) Mobile Country Code, identify the nationalities affected and, potentially, enable secondary alerts translated into their languages. 4. Recovery: Using the campaign data stored, potentially, by the MNOs and/or the PWS platform, to: • contact everyone who evacuated to advise them when it’s safe to return; • if there’s a likelihood of people having been contaminated by the release of a toxin, where to get medical help at specific hospitals; • enable the police to contact victims and witnesses, and • readily identify and locate people reported missing, who dispersed after an evacuation. The latter would have been vital in the aftermath of the 2018 California Wildfires when over 1,000 people were reported “missing” following mass evacuations. It took 14 days of anxious waiting and valuable resources to identify, finally, that in fact 83 lives had been lost and the others were safe.

22. Consequently, LBSMS is far better suited than CB to major emergencies when the authorities absolutely need to know how many people are affected in a defined geographic location and the human impacts of the incident. The LBSMS PWS gives them this critical situational authority that most CB solutions do not (other than “Advanced CB”). To make an analogy, using the PWS solely for alerting is like warning the public of rising floodwaters but failing to give the emergency services the information they need (that LBSMS provides) about: • how many people/mobile users are actually in the area at risk • how many evacuated safely on receipt of the alert • how many boats and rescue teams are now needed to save those who did not, and • where to focus the search.

23. If you believe that the public will not tolerate authorities using the PWS to process their subscriber metadata, let me give you a fact to consider. For the year-two review of “EA-

LBS”, I asked that question of the Australian communities who had received an alert. 82% responded to say that they put their personal safety above data privacy. Had we asked the same question (without actual evidence of its effect) prior to launching the Australian PWS, we may have had the reverse in response. The essential learning from this, about how the public really values its safety over privacy, is to base your judgements on hard evidence rather than supposition.

24. One of the important design features of CB is that the technology standard requires the alert to override the mobile phone user-settings with a loud and unique tone. This also means the user cannot silence the alert even though they may have set their device to mute all sounds. Thus, it is highly effective at alerting people who might otherwise not notice the warning because, for example, they are asleep. However, for a scenario involving an active shooter or marauding terrorist attack, CB cannot be used. This is because of the very real risk that its audible alert will give away the mobile-user’s hiding place. The only alternatives for CB are that the mobile-user either turns off their handset or configures it to not receive public warnings, both of which defeat the purpose of the PWS. Lessons from the terrorist attacks at London Bridge (UK - 3 June 2017) and Utøya (Norway - 22 July 2011) demonstrate the importance of the PWS not compromising personal safety in situations for which the government’s advice is “Run > Hide > Tell”. Only LBSMS can be used for such emergencies, as the mobile-user maintains full control of their settings. They can also configure their handset to recognise the PWS identifier, so that it has a unique tone and vibration cadence for the incoming SMS alert.

25. In countries where the landscape restricts installing a mobile telephone infrastructure, use of battery-powered and satellite connected loudspeakers and sirens offer a practical solution. Genasys has such a multi-channel PWS capability that combines its “LRAD” loudspeakers with LBSMS and/or CB.

26. In the interests of being fully inclusive, and so reach everyone affected within the warning area, authorities should also include within the PWS platform automated interfaces with the systems in common use by people with audio and visual disabilities.

27. Thus, the primary alerting channels for the PWS include: • Telephony, • Loudspeakers, and • Sirens

28. The secondary repeater channels that the PWS platform also needs to interface with include: • Television and radio broadcasts, • Official social media and websites, and • Smartphone apps. The challenge with the last one is that, for them to be fully inclusive, countries will need to make the app native to every mobile telephone sold in their jurisdiction. They will also need to make it available to international visitors automatically as a link to download in the “Welcome SMS” (giving the national rate advice). Clearly, that will take years to be available universally.

29. Of course, there are jurisdictions where, culturally, the legal framework does not allow authorities to process the mobile phone metadata for public safety that is critical to

LBSMS. Hence, for them, LBSMS may not be an option. Nonetheless, any country that chooses CB alone must, at Ministerial level, recognise the level of risk and legal liability involved should it not be accessible to and reach everyone with a mobile phone. As with Canada and New Zealand, a Minister will need to explain to the population why their government’s choice of PWS knowingly discriminates against a sizeable percentage of citizens and international visitors who, unwittingly, chose an incompatible handset, or live outside its coverage area.

30. Another issue for governments is that, unlike LBSMS, CB uses a technology that has no other operational purpose or commercial value. Hence, MNOs will expect the government to pay for and maintain it. This presents a risk to future-proofing the PWS. With LBSMS, the MNOs can share the costs. That is because its constituent technologies are also vital to delivering their core mobile telephony services today and into the future; for example, “SMS 2.0 - Rich Communications Services”.

31. What repeated evidence shows very clearly is that all countries need a PWS that emergency services can use to geographically target and reach only the people most affected by a specific localised event. For these, the emergency services often need to limit the warning area to the radius of a few hundred meters to cover, potentially, just a single building, or block of streets, similar to the inner and outer police cordons. In these more common incidents, the number of people affected is often in the low thousands. For example; in conjunction with the launch of EA-LBS, in December 2012, we used the system for an evacuation exercise targeting the 37-storey Department of Justice building in Melbourne. In less than 10 seconds, the PWS had identified the 5,736 devices connected to the networks and sent the alert to all 5,107 mobile phones. It reached 97% of the people in the building. Such a capability would have been invaluable to the London Fire Brigade at the Grenfell Tower Fire (June 2017), not only to inform everyone in the building of the fire survival guidance, but also generate near real- time situational awareness of the human impacts for the Incident Commander.

32. A final example from Australia is that, overall, while the average size of its warning campaigns is around 10,000, individually, it is very often less than 5,000. Experience there also shows that any larger and you risk causing widespread panic. As with the mistaken wide-area alert to the small-scale Epping grassfire (Victoria, Australia February 2013), the consequences can be that people not immediately affected will quickly congest the escape routes ahead of those who are. Hence, emergency services should heed this lesson and assess the consequences of alerting everyone in a city to a very localised incident; for example, a small-scale emergency during New Year’s Eve celebrations. Instead, they should limit the alert to the people at immediate risk first, and then expand it to areas further away, if required, and when safe to do so. In any event, social media channels will quickly disseminate (mis)information to the wider population. Thus, the critical element is to get the official message out first to those most at risk/affected.

In conclusion, what we have learned from our Zefonar-PSCE European Workshops is that: • The project to design and deliver an effective PWS has to be operationally driven and based on the user-authorities’ Concept of Operations. The latter will inevitably evolve as Incident Commanders quickly recognise the value of the PWS to saving life (and minimising the risks of their decisions). • No one technology can deliver all the benefits, so a hybrid, multi-channel platform is the only way to give access to and reach everyone. At its core must be mobile telephony. Whether this should combine CB with LBSMS, or either one or the other

is the choice of Ministers and emergency services chiefs. To do this, they need to understand how that will work for public safety and give the greatest return on their investment for the future. • Of critical importance is the capability of the PWS to provide the near real-time intelligence that Incident Commanders and Controllers need to monitor remotely the human impacts throughout the “Emergency Lifecycle”.

If you are involved in a national PWS project, do get in touch with PSCE and me about maximising your investment. We share your passion towards building a highly effective, future proofed PWS that ensures, in an emergency, we leave no one behind.

Michael Hallowes Managing Director, Zefonar Advisory Limited

Disclaimer: The author has endeavoured to provide a fair, accurate and objective analysis of all relevant factors and evidence provided in this White Paper. Nonetheless, there may be some minor errors or omissions. Where necessary, the reader should seek corroboration.

This paper is provided on the explicit understanding that it remains the property of the author and may not be reproduced, whether in part or in its entirety, or used for commercial gain without prior agreement from Zefonar Advisory. Please contact: [email protected] www.zefonar.com