Emergency Communications

The Federal Communications Commission proposed improvements for wireless call routing to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline that would connect callers in crisis to behavioral health resources in their state or county while protecting their privacy.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel held a roundtable discussion about the vote on net neutrality with community leaders and agencies at the Santa Clara County Fire Department in Campbell, California.  She chose the site to focus on how restoring net neutrality would benefit public safety, pointing to how that very fire department had had its internet access throttled—or cut off—automatically when it hit its internet use cap during the 2018 Mendocino Fire.  Chairwoman Rosenworcel heard from the department’s assistant fire chief, Brian Glass, who said fire agenci

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared with her colleagues a proposal that would improve how wireless calls to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988 Lifeline) are routed to ensure that callers in crisis have access to behavioral health resources in the state or territory they are calling from while protecting their privacy. Calls to the 988 Lifeline are currently routed based on the caller’s area code and exchange, which presents some obstacles to callers whose area code does not correspond the caller’s location when in crisis.

On February 22, 2024, our network partner, AT&T, experienced a broad outage that impacted public safety users of FirstNet. Based on initial reviews, the network outage occurred in the early hours of the morning on Thursday. The FirstNet network was restored by around 5:00 a.m. CST — about 3 hours since service was initially affected for some FirstNet subscribers across the country. AT&T says the outage was due to the application and execution of an incorrect process used while expanding its network; AT&T stated it was not the result of a cyberattack.

Nine former chairs of the Federal Communications Commission issued a letter to the US House and Senate leaders, urging Congress to make the nationwide transition to next-generation 911 a “top priority.” Experts say the new, internet-based system is a much-needed replacement to the aging, telephone-based emergency communications infrastructure that’s been used across the US for decades. The letter penned by former FCC officials follows similar correspondence sent to Congress in January by a coalition of nine national organizations—including the National Emerge

Here’s what to expect at the Federal Communications Commission's March Open Meeting.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed that the FCC add a new alert option to deliver critical messages to the public over television and radio about missing and endangered persons. Adding a new “Missing and Endangered Persons” alert code to the nation’s Emergency Alert System would help law enforcement provide timely alerts to galvanize public attention to missing native and indigenous persons, as well as other groups, and build on efforts to collect comprehensive data on these cases.

At today’s meeting, I voted on two consumer issues—to ask cable programmers, and television and radio stations for their help to achieve the critical goal of providing timely information about emergencies to the public, in a language they can understand; and to clarify that consumers can opt-out of call or text lists using any reasonable means and may respond in the language in which they received the communication.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed rules that would make it easier for emergency managers to send emergency alerts in non-English languages to the public over television and radio. The proposal would remove a key barrier to sending multilingual messages through the Emergency Alert System, which could in turn spur more alerts that are accessible to more people—and potentially save lives. In a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking adopted February 15, the Commission is seeking comment on proposals to:

The Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau seeks comment on specific mechanisms to implement multilingual Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). Through these measures, the Bureau advances the priority that WEA serve as an effective and accessible life-saving tool for many, including the millions of people living in the United States who do not primarily speak English or Spanish and the estimated one-in-four adults in the United States that have some form of disability who remain at risk for not being able to receive and understand the potentially life-savi