employed techs who are part of the TR community see this article. However, I can see how the system can be very useful if anyone bothered to set it up right. Sadly, you can bet that because it's set up by bureaucrats it's a total stuff up. The problem is they need to localise the alerts a lot more than they appear to do, and they should enable you to set up your localised area or areas based on the knowledge of the local situations.

What I mean with that is for people in tornado alley they need to have a different sized alert area and alert criteria for tornadoes than they have for floods or fires. You need to be able to set up the size of the alert to suit each local area - local being defined as about a five mile radius up to a fifty mile radius, dependent upon the item of danger and past local activity.

An example of what I mean is the nearest city to where I live in rural New South Wales, Australia. Wagga Wagga is a fair sized city sitting on a major river, heavy rain upstream can cause floods in this area as there is a very extensive flood plain on one side of the city. When a local flood alert goes out is goes to everyone in the city plus for about fifteen kilometres around the city. All well and good, except that only about 5% of the city can be directly affected by a flood - I say directly as a flood that gets over the levee invades most of the business area and makes a shopping a boating experience if anyone opens up, and about 98% of the area flooded in most floods is the less well protected grazing lands on the other side of the river to the city. In short, about thirty or so farmers need to move stock and about 2% of residents need to move and about 40% of business have issues if the flood gets into the city. So, do the majority of the people need minute by minute flood alerts, no, but a system like WEA will give everyone the alerts. What I suggest is you should be able to set the degree of danger etc based on your personal circumstance.

In Marks example, those near the water courses that carry the water from the next county need to be alerted, but the people on the side of his county away from the water courses don't need it.

Personally, I'm glad we don't have it - but then, I don't read or answer any SMS messages as I tell everyone my phone is for calling me, not sending a message in the hopes you got the right number.