Emergency population warning

An emergency population warning is a method whereby local, regional, or national authorities can contact members of the public en masse to warn them of an impending emergency. These warnings may be necessary for a number of reasons, including:

Many local areas use emergency population warnings to advise of prison escapes, abducted children, emergency telephone number outages, and other events.

In order to develop an effective emergency warning system, certain things are required:

Early warning system is the term that the International Early Warning Programme coordinated by the United Nations uses for all systems that are used to send emergency population warnings. (IEWP 2007)

The United Nations relies on the Everbridge Aware emergency notification system (ENS) to alert its 10,000 staff to address their safety and security when a critical incident or event occurs.

The United Nations Development Programme uses the Send Word Now Emergency Notification System to alert its worldwide staff when an urgent situation arises.

On June 11, 2009, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved a proposal by Pelmorex, owners of The Weather Network and MétéoMédia, to require all television providers in Canada to carry the channels, in exchange for developing a "national aggregator and distributor" of localized emergency alert messages compliant with the . The alert system, built on a backend known as the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination system (NAAD), was first established in 2010, and further expanded as a result of consultation with government officials, broadcasters, and the CRTC. In August 2014, the CRTC ruled that all television stations, radio stations, and broadcast distribution undertakings had to begin mandatory carriage of local alerts relayed through NAAD by March 31, 2015.

The province of Alberta had its own system called the Emergency Public Warning System (EPWS). The EPWS was put into place after a major tornado swept through the city of Edmonton in 1987, killing 27 and causing millions of dollars in damage. Unlike the American EAS, however, broadcast of the EPWS is not mandatory on radio and television stations. It was broadcast on the CKUA Radio Network and is televised on Access TV and by co-operating stations. EPWS warnings can be initiated by municipal police and fire departments, the provincial government, county authorities, tribal government agencies, Environment Canada, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. CKUA developed and maintained the EPWS until January 2010, when the contract was lost to an Ottawa firm.

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