A volunteer in a marked vest handing water and an information sheet to a resident at a community shelter set up in a school gymnasium after a storm.

Part 3 of 6

Community Impact & Public Warning

For the people who have to keep a community fed, sheltered and informed: the eight lifelines that describe what an incident has actually broken, why a message that was sent is not a warning that worked, and a tool for thinking it through before the incident.

Successfully pressing send is not the same as successfully warning a community.

Community lifelines

Lifelines describe what the community has lost rather than which agencies are busy, and that turns out to be the more decision-useful view. There are eight. Water Systems was added on August 1, 2023, when drinking water and wastewater moved out of the food lifeline — which was renamed at the same time. Plenty of material still in circulation says seven.

Open one to see the questions it has to be able to answer.

Safety and Security
  • Is law enforcement able to operate?
  • Is the fire service able to respond?
  • Is search and rescue underway, and does it have what it needs?
  • Are government services functioning?
  • Is the community safe enough for people to return?
Food, Hydration, Shelter
  • Are people sheltered, and where?
  • Is food reaching them?
  • Is drinking water being distributed where the system has failed?
  • What is happening to agriculture?
  • How long can the current arrangement hold?
Health and Medical
  • Are hospitals operational?
  • What is EMS demand, and can it be met?
  • Are any facilities evacuating?
  • Is the medical supply chain intact?
  • Are dialysis, oxygen and pharmacy accessible?
  • Is fatality management capacity adequate?
Energy
  • Is electric service functioning, and where is it not?
  • Which critical facilities are affected?
  • Are generators available, and fueled?
  • What fuel supply exists for responders and the public?
  • When is restoration expected?
  • What else fails because of this outage?
Communications
  • Is 911 functioning?
  • Are public safety radio systems operational?
  • Are cellular networks up?
  • Is there internet connectivity?
  • Are public warning systems available?
  • What backup exists, and has anyone used it?
Transportation
  • Which roads are passable?
  • Is mass transit running?
  • Are railways, airports and ports operational?
  • Can responders and supplies physically reach the affected area?
  • Can people leave?
Hazardous Materials
  • Are any facilities compromised?
  • Is there a release, and what is its extent?
  • Are pollutants or contaminants moving?
  • Is debris hazardous?
  • Who is exposed?
Water Systems
  • Is potable water infrastructure operating — intake, treatment, storage, distribution?
  • Is there a boil notice, and who does it reach?
  • Is wastewater being collected and treated?
  • Are there leaks or breaks, and how many?
  • Which critical facilities are affected?

The value is in the framing. "Three engines committed" tells leadership about you. "Twelve thousand households without potable water, restoration unknown" tells them about the community, and points at a decision.

Public warning is a human behavior problem

Successfully pressing send is not the same as successfully warning a community. A message has to survive five steps, and it fails at whichever one it reaches first.

  1. Step 1 of 5Receive

    Did it reach the right people, in the right area, on something they were looking at?

  2. Step 2 of 5Understand

    Did they know what it meant? Plain words, in the languages the community actually speaks, and reachable if they cannot see or hear it.

  3. Step 3 of 5Believe

    Did they think it applied to them? This is where alert fatigue does its damage — a community trained by irrelevant alerts to ignore the relevant one.

  4. Step 4 of 5Know what to do

    Did the message say what action to take, specifically enough to act on?

  5. Step 5 of 5Act

    Could they actually do it? A message telling people to evacuate a road that is already closed fails here, having succeeded at everything else.

Every one of these is a question you can ask about a message before it goes out, and after.

The channels, and what each is for

No single channel reaches a community. Redundancy is not duplication; it is how you reach the people the first channel missed.

  • IPAWS — the federal gateway that feeds several of the channels below, and needs authority to use
  • Wireless Emergency Alerts — reaches phones in an area without anyone having signed up, with tight limits on length and targeting
  • The Emergency Alert System — broadcast radio and television
  • Local mass notification — reaches people who opted in, which is never everybody
  • Sirens, where a community has them and knows what they mean
  • Social media, which reaches quickly and unevenly, and where corrections travel slower than rumor
  • Your own website, which is where people go to check whether something is real
  • News media, which will report it whether or not you brief them
  • Trusted community partners — faith leaders, schools, employers, community organizations — who reach people no system does

Geographic targeting, multiple languages and accessibility are not refinements. They decide whether the warning worked for the people most likely to be harmed.

Build an incident readiness snapshot

Five questions. It arranges your answers into the shape of a readiness discussion, and hands back the questions your jurisdiction still has to answer for itself. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or saved.

What incident are you thinking about?

Step 1 of 4

Which community lifelines could it affect?

Step 2 of 4

Think about what the community loses, not which agencies get busy.

What will decision-makers need to know in the first operational period?

Step 3 of 4

Not everything you could collect — what a decision actually turns on.

What could exceed local capacity?

Step 4 of 4

The things you would have to ask somebody else for.

And then

Questions only your jurisdiction can answer

These are not on the form because nobody else can answer them. They go into the snapshot so you can take them to the people who can.

Coordination
Will an EOC be activated, and who has the authority to activate it? Who needs to be represented in it? Is unified command likely, and with whom? Who provides executive policy direction? Who owns the common operating picture?
Public information
How will people receive a warning, protective action instructions, evacuation and shelter information, updates, corrections to rumor, and recovery information? In which languages, and through which trusted local voices?
Continuity
What happens if the EOC cannot be occupied, the internet fails, cellular fails, commercial power is gone, the primary radio system fails, half the trained staff cannot report, or a critical vendor is unavailable?
Recovery documentation
Who is capturing personnel time, equipment use, purchases, contracts, mutual aid, damage, debris, photographs, locations, operational decisions and resource requests — starting now, not afterwards?

Your incident readiness snapshot

Answer the questions and your snapshot appears here, ready to copy into a document or take to a meeting.

This is an educational planning aid, not a risk assessment. It is not a THIRA, not an emergency operations plan and not a FEMA assessment of anything. It calculates nothing and scores nothing — every word in the snapshot is one you typed or chose. It exists to start a conversation in a room, and the questions it hands back are the point of it.

What to do next

All of this assumes the systems carrying it stay up. The next part asks what happens when they do not, and what to ask a vendor before believing an answer.

Read: System Resilience & Technology Evaluation

All 6 parts of Emergency Management