by msla 8 hours ago
Yeah. I'm down on commercial AM/FM radio being touted as an emergency service, because there's so rarely enough behind the scenes to make it reliable or even minimally usable as such, but this is something purpose-built to fill that role, and shutting it down means there's nothing which can fill it, given how worthless commercial radio is at the task:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment
> Because it was the middle of the night, there were few people at local radio stations, all operated by Clear Channel with mostly automated programming. No formal emergency warnings were issued for several hours while Minot officials located station managers at home. North Dakota's public radio network, Prairie Public Broadcasting, was notified and did broadcast warnings to citizens.
If you wanted to make commercial radio even minimally acceptable as an emergency alert system you'd be... guess what... reinventing EAS and EAS-a-likes, except more expensive and less responsive! EAS never has to "Interrupt This Program" it can just get to the meat.
> If you wanted to make commercial radio even minimally acceptable as an emergency alert system you'd be... guess what... reinventing EAS and EAS-a-likes, except more expensive
Exactly, whatever it costs to operate and maintain the emergency and weather services commercial radio would need to make enough money to pay for that, and then also make enough money on top of that to stuff their pockets with profit. The people shouldn't be on the hook for those extra expenses while private companies do everything in their power to degrade the service in order to lower their costs to increase profits even farther.