WASHINGTON-A Clinton administration aide last week denied that industry or political pressure has played a part in delaying the issuance of a White House report advocating mobile phones and other wireless technologies for alerting citizens of emergencies like tornadoes, hurricanes and chemical spills.
The delay comes as the problem of an outdated national emergency warning system receives increased attention in the press and in the private sector and from an outspoken consumer group in St. Louis.
“It’s very frustrating and disheartening,” said Douglas (Bud) Weiser, immediate past president of the Cellular Emergency Alert Services Association. “Why does it take three years to make their own report public? What is the explanation?”
A White House aide, speaking on background, said the report is being held up because it has not been decided which federal agency or agencies should take the lead in publicizing it.
“There is no political pressure on this one,” said the White House aide.
The report, prepared by a blue-ribbon panel of government and private-sector experts, was completed in September 1997. Pete Ward, chairman of the committee on natural disaster information systems, said he is growing increasingly impatient with the White House’s handling of the matter.
Ward said he is withholding judgment on whether political or industry pressure is influencing the report’s publication.
Vice President Gore has played a key role in discussions here and abroad on the development of a global disaster information network. A multigovernment agency report in December 1999 said mobile phones-which number 100 million in the United States-were among the new technologies that could improve disaster warnings.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a unit of the Commerce Department, held a roundtable July 17 to highlight the need for additional technologies to alert the public of emergencies.
“The weather radio service provided by the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmosphere (Administration) has been, and continues to be, the mainstay of our weather warning systems. But there is much that communications industries working with state, local and federal government can do to provide the public with timely warnings in case of an emergency to augment those services,” said Greg Rohde, head of NTIA, earlier this summer.
Several parties, which filed comments with the NTIA last month as a follow-up to the July 17 meeting, said technology is available today to provide hazard warnings to mobile phones and other wireless devices.
“Most of today’s wireless systems such as IS 54 D-AMPS and GSM, support a feature called `Cell Broadcasting,’ ” said Mark Wood, British author of the book, Disaster Communications. Wood also lecturers about mobile-phone systems for L.M. Ericsson in London.
“A public-warning message in text can be sent to the screens of all mobiles having such capability-in any group of cells of any size, ranging from one single cell-about 5 miles across-to the whole country if required. To my present knowledge, all GSM phones have this capability, as do D-AMPS phones, but not analog AMPS phones,” he stated.
Wood said iDEN dispatch-mobile phones have cell broadcast alert capability as well. Wood said he did not know if cell broadcast alerts could be deployed over wireless systems using CDMA technology.
Verizon Communications’ paging division told NTIA existing messaging systems are not well suited for hazard warnings.
No mobile-phone carrier or manufacturer and none of the wireless trade associations responded to NTIA’s request for comments. Replies were due Sept. 1.
The idea of expanding the government’s emergency alert program by folding mobile phones into the mix does not interest the cellular industry. The industry insists market forces will address the problem.
