Last week while I was drafting a brief in my office, I heard a tone coming from my iPhone that I had never heard before. In fact, at first I didn’t think that my iPhone was the source of the noise; I thought it was some alarm tone broadcast over the emergency speaker system in my office building. It turns out that it was a Wireless Emergency Alert for a flash flood in my area. Here are the details on Wireless Emergency Alerts so that if you hear one on your iPhone you will know what is going on. I’ll start by explaining what they are, and then I’ll discuss how they are implemented on the iPhone and how you can manage them.
The WARN Act and WEA
Title VI of PL 109-347 (Oct. 13, 2006) is titled the Warning Alert and Response Network Act, sometimes called the WARN Act. The WARN Act, in 47 U.S.C. § 1201, gives the FCC the authority to adopt standards for cell phone companies to transmit emergency alerts. Participation by cell phone companies is voluntary — they don’t have to participate — but if they do, the law states that cell phone companies may not impose an additional charge for such alerts. 47 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(2)(C).
Pursuant to the WARN Act, the FCC worked with FEMA to create a program called Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). The system was based on the existing Emergency Alert System (EAS), which are the warnings that you get on a television and radio when there is a weather or other emergency.
Alerts are sent to cell towers providing wireless service to a target geographical area, and then all WEA-capable phones using those cell towers receive the alert. Thus, you will receive an alert if you are in a targeted area even if you are just visiting that area.
WEA delivers only three types of alerts:
1. Emergency Alerts. These are alerts issued because of an imminent threat to public safety or life, such as evacuation orders or
shelter in place orders due to severe weather, a terrorist threat or
chemical spill. For example, the National Weather Service says that it sends WEA alerts for tsunami warnings, tornado and flash flood warnings, hurricane, typhoon, dust storm and extreme wind warnings and blizzard and ice storm warnings. The way it works is that a pre-authorized national, state or local government agency sends an emergency
alert to FEMA, which then sends
the alert to the participating cell phone companies, each of which then sends the alert to WEA capable phones in the zone of emergency.
2. AMBER Alerts. AMBER officially stands for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, but that is a backronym as the system was really named for Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old girl who was abducted in 1996 while riding her bicycle in Arlington, TX and was subsequently murdered. The killer was never identified. The incident, and others like it, led to the AMBER Alert system, a method by which police officers may quickly publicize information when a child age 17 or younger is abducted such as the name and description of the child, a description of the suspected abductor, a description and license plate of the abductor’s vehicle, etc. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 158 AMBER Alerts involving 197 children were issued in the U.S. in 2011. 144 of those children were eventually found, and AMBER Alerts played a role in 28 of those cases. The original AMBER Alert system was opt-in only, and sent a text message based on a cell phone owner’s pre-defined geographical location regardless of where a cell phone was actually located when the alert was issued. That system was retired on December 31, 2012 to be replaced by the new, improved WEA system.
3. Presidential Alerts. I am not aware of any official standards for when the President will issue a WEA Presidential Alert. No president has ever issued a Presidential Alert under WEA or similar prior systems (and hopefully, no president will ever have a need to do so). The WARN Act provides in 47 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(2)(E) that while cell phone users may opt-out of emergency alerts and AMBER Alerts, a user may not opt-out of Presidential Alerts.
WEA capable devices are designed to reject duplicate alerts, so you should receive each alert only once. However, subsequent alerts may be issued that contain information similar to a prior alert. You might not receive an alert at all if you are on the phone. The AT&T website says that you might not receive an alert if “your device was in an active voice call or data session during the time period that the Wireless Emergency Alert was broadcast.” And the Verizon website says that “if you are engaged in a voice or data session when alerts are released,
you will not receive the alert. Alerts may be re-broadcast at specific
intervals in the targeted geographic locations, in order to reach as
many devices as possible. However, after that interval has concluded, or
the alerts have been superseded, the original alert will no longer be
released.”
AT&T just turned on the WEA system for iPhones in June of 2013,
which is why I had not heard one before last week. AT&T did so by pushing software updates to iPhones starting on June 14, 2013. To receive the update you had to be using an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5 running iOS 6.1 or later. (I believe that if you sync your iPhone with iTunes on a computer, you might be able to receive the AT&T update even if your device doesn’t quite meet those specifications.)
After the update was installed last month, if you were paying attention, you saw an alert that
said: “Carrier Settings Update: new settings required for your device
have been installed.” I understand that Verizon and Sprint enabled WEA
for iPhones in 2012. I don’t believe that T-Mobile has enabled WEA for iPhones yet.
WEA on the iPhone
If your iPhone supports WEA and the carrier has turned it on for your phone, then the default setting is that you receive all three types of alerts. When an alert comes in, you will hear a tone and see a message on the screen.
As noted above, when I first heard the sound last week, it was a tone that I had never heard before from my iPhone so it caught me by surprise. The following YouTube video shows a WEA alert triggered by a hack on an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy G3. I’m fairly certain that this is the same sound that I heard:
The tone only sounds if your ringer/silent switch is in the “up” position. With the ringer switched off, the phone just vibrates when you get an alert. This is yet another reason to keep your iPhone in silent mode when you are in court; your judge might not be happy that you disrupted the proceedings because there was a flash flood alert.
The message itself looks like a text message but it actually is not. A different technology called Cell Broadcast is used to send the alerts, which is important because after a disaster, cell phone service can get highly congested which can result in delays for text messages. This also means that you can receive alerts even if you have text messaging turned off. I didn’t take a screen shot of my iPhone last week when I received an emergency alert, but here is one that I found in the MacRumors forum that shows you what a WEA alert looks like:
Even after you dismiss the alert, you can still see it in the Notifications Center. Here is the alert that I saw last week:
While all three WEA alerts are turned on by default, you can turn off two of them if you want to do so. Open the Settings app and go to Notifications and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. You will see switches that let you turn off AMBER Alerts and/or Emergency Alerts. As noted above, the WARN Act prohibits turning off Presidential Alerts, so there is no option for that.
Although WEA alerts are based on your location, you do not need to have Location Services on the iPhone turned on to receive alerts. Your iPhone’s GPS radio is irrelevant to the WEA system. As noted above, alerts are issued based upon your location as determined by cell towers.
After the flash flood alert went to iPhone users in downtown New Orleans last week, I spoke with many New Orleans attorneys who were annoyed with the alert because it caught them by surprise. Having said that, I think that the main problem was a lack of prior knowledge; I myself wasn’t fully aware how this system worked until I researched this post. My guess is that once people understand why these alerts are sent and understand that they have the ability to manage them, most folks will appreciate the value of the WARN Act and the WEA system.
Thanks, Jeff. iPhoneJD is always a go-to source for info, and this is a great example. I too had a flash flood alert (in NC) and couldn’t figure out where it came from (I thought it might have been related to one of my weather apps). Good to know what’s going on with the alerts and how they work.
Great job.
The first time I got a weather alert, I was confused as well. My phone didn’t make that noise normally I thought it was my girlfriends phone. Later I looked and sure enough there was a flash flood warning.
Interesting on my Verizon iPhone the on off buttons for the two alerts do not appear.
I get the weather, traffic, etc… alerts from an area 100 miles away. Not sure why that is. Does anyone know how to change this so I can get something local to me?
As time goes on, the agencies issuing the alerts will get more familiar and better at it and be able to send alerts to more specific areas within a polygon rather then county or even statewide.
So baisically if there is a zombie apocalypse we will get a text on our phones… We’ll this is gonna come in handy.
Thanks for your info… it was helpful to me today. I had never received an alert before but was on a lot of government sites today. A bunch of AMBER alerts came thru this evening and I thought I’d somehow signed up while surfing. It was driving me crazy!
Thanks for explaining. Received an amber alert today on my iphone. I think it is an excellent system in case of emergency. I don’t mind being annoyed if it’s going to save my life or someone else’s, especially a child.
i would like to delete the old wea alerts – is there a way to do it – pls note I do not want to turn the alerts off – just delete the old ones – thank you very much for your help
why does the president or his designate get 24/4 acces to my cell phone, doesn’t he work for the people, I want his phone number so I can let him know how idiotic he and the democrats are being, After the UN-Afordable Healthcare Act what will the make us buy next.
Dear am,
I don’t quite follow how you blame these emergency alerts on Democrats and/or President Obama. As I stated in my post, these alerts are a result of the enactment of PL 109-347. The bill was introduced by a Sen. DeMint, who at the time was a Republican from South Carolina and who is currently the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank organization. At the time that the bill passed the House and the Senate in 2006, both were controlled by the Republican Party. And it was signed into law on October 13, 2006 by President Bush.
-Jeff
Last night I had my phone ringer off, as I usually do when I sleep. As such, I did not hear, or click on, the emergency alerts sent during the middle of the night. In the morning, the phone alarm clock did not go off until I clicked on that emergency alert (as I had mercifully been awakened by a back up alarm). So apparently the alarm clock goes silent until you have acknowledged the alert. This is not a helpful development. I don’t want to miss my morning alarm because there was a flash flood warning in the middle of the night. Can this be changed?
Alina,
Wow, I never realized that it worked that way. And I cannot test this for myself to confirm it or try to find a workaround because I can’t manually force my iPhone to get an emergency alert in the middle of the night. Thanks for the warning, and this looks like something that Apple needs to fix.
-Jeff
Well, I guess it would be considered inappropriate to kidnap a child to generate an AMBER alert. 🙂 (I’m kidding. I really am. No need to call the police. Really.)
Thanks so much! just checked phone, it is on! what app do you suggest to see local radars if my electricity goes out??
If you mean an app to see a weather radar, my current favorite is the app NOAA Hi-Def Radar by WeatherSphere. It costs $1.99 and works well.
-Jeff
That info is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
I just got a civil warning message but as soon as I unlocked my
Phone it went away where can I find it to read what it’s about?
Chris, you can still see the alert even after you have dismissed it by looking in the Notification Center. I have a picture of that in this post.
-Jeff
So I found the Amber alert in notifications but it didn’t show the whole alert. How do I open it to read the rest of the info?
I haven’t received a WEA alert, such as an AMBER alert, in a while. I thought you just tapped on them, but I don’t have one to test.
-Jeff
Is there a way I can reduce the volume of the alerts or or select a different sound for the alerts independent of my regular ringtones and their volume? When the alarm goes off in the middle of the night, I don’t have to worry about the emergency, I’m still trying to get over the heart attack! 😉
James
Good question, but I don’t know of a way to do that.
-Jeff
Hi Jeff
I have a user that used to get these alerts until about two weeks ago. I have checked the setting on the iPhone, all alerts are set to on, location is enabled. Any idea as to why these would have stopped showing up? Any help is greatly appreciated!
-Aaron
I really don’t know. The alerts come from the carrier, so you could try asking AT&T / Verizon / whoever. Is it possible that there just have not been any alerts in that area in the last two weeks? I get alerts very rarely — maybe one AMBER alert a year, and maybe one severe weather alert every two months.
-Jeff
I just discovered the WEA feature yesterday as Tropical Storm Bill was creeping over our house. I couldn’t figure out what that tone was. Sounded like a sonar ‘ping’ on an old black and white WWII submarine movie.
Investigating this morning, I discovered the WEA system. What I do NOT understand is… I get the PING sound but no message ever shows up on my screen, nor are there any in the drop down “Notification” screen.
Same with my bride’s iP5. She gets the pings but there are no messages in “Notifications.” She does, however, the messages on her iPad.
When we get the warning tone, it would be nice to know what the actual message is. I don’t see anything in phone settings to address this. It’s either ON or OFF.
Suggestions? Anybody?
Hello this just happened to me last night. I’m in a different city and a flash flood warning came to my phone at 445am and my alarm on my iPhone didn’t go off and I almost got fired for missing a huge meeting. I’m not knocking the system but it almost cost me my job. So if you travel turn off the alerts of make sure you have the Old school wake up calls from the front desk. Which I will do from now on. No fun waking up 1 hour late in sheer panic and wondering why alarms or text messages don’t come thru.
So glad I’m not the only one.
J
Thanks all
Thank you for the research. I was aware of the alerts (I received only one when I first bought my phone 2 years ago) but they haven’t worked since. The alerts are turned on in the settings in my iphone. Do the alerts have to use the cell signal? I don’t have reliable reception at my home but my texts come in fine through WiFi?
Jodi, I think that your hunch is correct. The texts come from the cellphone companies and depend upon your cellphone signal to determine your location. If you are just using WiFi, with a poor cellphone reception, you might not get some alerts.
-Jeff
I don’t have the setting on my iphone 4 seems I will die
Ok, here is a new one. Today I received an alert on an old iPhone 5 that was at home while I was at work. The kicker is that all antennas,(cellular, Bluetooth, and wifi), were all switched off, yet the phone still received a “Flash-flood Alert” with no connections on. How could this be? This older iPhone has not had active service for a couple of years now.
Fascinating.
-Jeff
My iPhone went off when I was driving and caused me to almost wreck!
I live in Louisiana. My amber alerts and emergency alerts aren’t working. Can anyone tell me why? I haven’t opted out! They shud be working! Please please help!
Why do I hear my family’s phones having audible voice alerts for emergency weather ? But nothing from my own ?
anyone ever receive an emergency alert on their iPhone regarding an automobile ?
thank you
I get the alerts … they disapearBefore I can read them absolutely useless