FCC Details New Emergency Altert Obligations

The Federal Communications Commission released a Fifth Report and Order in its review and overhaul of the of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). With this order, the FCC codifies in detail the general obligation the FCC adopted in the Second Report and Order in this docket to require EAS Participants to be able to receive Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)-formatted messages. This will enable EAS Participants not only to receive CAP-formatted alert messages, but also to redistribute those messages in the legacy EAS format over the current broadcast-based EAS.

Specifically, CAP-formatted EAS alerts:

• will be converted into and processed in the same way as messages formatted in the EAS Protocol; and
• will be used to generate enhanced visual displays for the viewers of the EAS station processing the CAP message.

In addition, the FCC is streamlining the Part 11 rules to improve the overall effectiveness of the EAS.