Government Providing All Hazards Alert Radios for Nation’s Schools

A partnership of several federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will see the nation’s schools get public alert radios to warn them of impending disaster.

In an article on the Government Technology website, Corey McKenna says the NOAA and other agencies began distributing 182,000 public alert radios to preschools, Head Start programs, K-12 nonpublic schools and nonpublic school central offices, K-12 school district offices and post-secondary schools earlier this month. In two earlier phases, the federal government distributed radios to all 97,000 K-12 public schools across the country. The radios will be in every school in the nation by the end of this month.

“The potential benefit of the public alert radios was demonstrated a few years ago by events at Charles F. Johnson Elementary School in Endicott, N.Y. The school received a weather warning from their radio, allowing the principal to alert teachers and make sure that all students were safely in the school’s interior hallways,” McKenna says. “Within minutes of the warning, 70 mph winds ripped the roof off the school. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Those inside did not even see the damage happen.”

How do the new radios work? McKenna says the public alert radios include a special receiver capable of picking up the very high frequency on which the alerts are broadcast. The radios pick up signals from a network of more than 985 transmitters throughout all 50 states, adjacent coastal waters, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the US Pacific Territories.

The NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards network (NWR) provides alerts and safety steps on a wide range of emergencies, from an approaching tornado, a telephone outage disrupting 911 emergency services, local roads overrun by flash floods, chemical releases or oil spills, or the urgent need to be on the lookout for an abducted child.