But if you're about to be incinerated in real
life -- Paradise -- you want the alert.
It's very fortunate that nobody was seriously injured after that total failure of the process.
The people who run this stuff need to understand that a false alert can be very dangerous.
I agree lack of training and funding for local emergency managers is an ongoing problem.
In absolute numbers, more people have died without receiving warnings about an imminent hazard (mostly wildfires and tornados) in each of the last 5 years than have been severely injured after all the false EAS and WEA alerts combined in the last 5 years.
Of course, its impossible to attribute cause of death directly due to lack of warning. But local officials being so afraid of issuing warnings means they don't issue them at all, or too late. It doesn't attract as much press attention, but lack of warning has been a recurring issue in local disasters.
The National Weather Service does a good job with weather warnings, maybe too much overwarning. On the other hand, if a non-weather hazard such as a wildfire, industrial accident, chemical cloud happens; local emergency managers have little practice or training how to alert the public.
Amber alerts are another matter.
NCMEC (Amber Alerts) had the largest geographic area, between 100,000 sqkm
and 1,000,000 sqkm. This might indicate over-alerting geographic policies,
which should be reviewed by Amber Alert coordinators.
Total NWS NCMEC State/Local
0 sqkm 0 0 0 0
up to 1 sqkm 0 0 0 0
up to 10 sqkm 0 0 0 0
up to 100 sqkm 0 0 0 0
up to 1,000 sqkm 56 49 0 7
up to 10,000 sqkm 325 193 7 125
up to 100,000 sqkm 88 22 55 11
up to 1,000,000 sqkm 109 1 91 17
up to 10,000,000 sqkm 1 0 0 1
Subtotal 579 265 153 161
There is a reason why people complain about Amber Alerts more than any other type of emergency alert.