Emergency Alerts on your Phone

3/30/2021 (Permalink)

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) can save your life. Here's how it works: when the National Weather Service issues an urgent alert for a storm in your location, the system looks to see which cell phone towers are included in the storm’s area. All cell phone towers within the warning area send out an instant emergency alert to WEA-enabled devices. The alert plays the classic emergency alert tone and pushes a notification to your screen.

The great benefit to these alerts is that they only go off if you're in the area affected by hazardous weather. This helps remedy the problem of receiving false alarms for storms dozens of miles away on the other side of your county. If you receive an emergency alert on your smartphone, you know you need to take immediate action to keep yourself and your family safe. Wireless Emergency Alerts are pushed out for tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, hurricane warnings, dust storm warnings, extreme wind warnings, and local dangers such as AMBER Alerts and evacuation orders.

Source: Forbes November 2018