Delaware uses IPAWS to send statewide panic over a local incident

The misuse of SAME/FIPS codes by the state emergency management agency further increases "alert fatigue" and puts the integrity of EAS/WEA further into question.

On January 8, 2025, there was a hazardous materials incident at a Purdue Farms poultry plant in Georgetown, Delaware. At 6:34PM, the Georgetown Fire Company declared a “shelter in place” in the area around Savannah Rd. in the town:

A little bit earlier at 6:21PM, the Delaware Emergency Management Agency (DEMA) took to the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) with this message:

“This is an emergency notification from the Georgetown Police Department. Due to a hazardous materials incident at the Perdue plant, all residents are advised to shelter in place. Please remain inside until further notice. Thank you for your cooperation.”

The alert was sent into IPAWS as both EAS (Emergency Alert System) and WEA (Wireless Emergency Alerts) under the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) type code of LEW (“Law Enforcement Warning”).¹

However, there was a problem with how DEMA delivered this message out.

They sent the alert to the entire state of Delaware. You can tell that because of the SAME location codes for all three counties (010001 for Kent, 010003 for New Castle and 010005 for Sussex) were sent as opposed to only sending the code for Sussex County (010005).

This means that every radio and television station from Wilmington to Delmar as well as those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland that reach any of Delaware’s three counties and has one of those Delaware counties programmed in their EAS decoder would have received this alert and if they are participating in forwarding LEW messages, then programming would have been interrupted for this message. This could mean that a listener to a FM station in Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, perhaps only hearing the tail end of the message could have been under the impression that their area was under a shelter in place despite the incident being isolated to a small area of southern Delaware.

Likewise, this would have also triggered alerts on wireless phones throughout the entire state.

It took over an hour and a half for DEMA to realize that they made an error.

“This is an update regarding the earlier notification. Only residents in Ward 2 in Georgetown, Delaware, between North Bedford Street and East Market Street should continue to shelter in place. If you are outside this area, you may disregard the previous message.”

In case you are wondering about this “Ward 2” that set off this statewide panic, it’s the brown area on the map below:

Map credit: Town of Georgetown

While this was not a “false alert”, per se, it did create unnecessary false panic for all parts of Delaware and portions of neighboring states outside the isolated part of Sussex County where the actual danger existed.

These types of preventable false alarms further contribute to “alert fatigue” where the public feels they are receiving too many alerts and they are more likely to ignore them or in the case of wireless alerts, opt out of certain alert types, which runs the risk of leaving them in the dark when there is a real emergency.

In DC, the EAS is a huge priority at the Federal Communications Commission, where under the Democrat-led Jessica Rosenworcel administration, has been pushing multiple unfunded federal mandates on radio and television broadcast stations, including the smallest of radio stations. These mandates have put a financial burden on many small radio stations, including EAS initiatives that only benefit television and not radio. A recent change made by the Rosenworcel administration required every radio station to purchase a software upgrade from their EAS equipment provider. Depending on the manufacturer, this put small radio stations out $159 to $1,000 and in some cases, required radio stations to purchase new EAS equipment in the range of $4,000. All for a mandate that provides zero benefit to the delivery of alerts over the radio.

The Roseworcel administration was also looking at a horrible way to implement “multi-lingual alerting” in EAS that will further drain the coffers of broadcasters. I hope the incoming Carr administration takes notice of this and we can work on ways of delivering multi-lingual alerts in a manner that is tailored to the diverse communities within each market area. Actually, such changes can be done without much FCC interaction. It only requires participation by the alerting agencies and the broadcast industry (some markets already carry alerts in Spanish parallel to those carried in English).

Getting back to Georgetown, it appears that there is a huge breakdown at DEMA and the structure of emergency response in the state. This incident only proves that the system is broken. The incident raises some questions:

• Why didn’t the Town of Georgetown issue the alert in IPAWS as opposed to DEMA?

• Is there some kind of jurisdictional policy in Delaware where all EAS/WEA from local agencies have to be first routed to DEMA, who acts as a gatekeeper?

• Is the staff at DEMA even trained on how to send a partial state alert?

• Will this incident be investigated by DEMA, FEMA and/or the FCC?

This type of incident also highlights the need for a process that is being trialed in a couple of areas of the country, Partial County Alerting. For counties with larger land mass, Partial County Alerting would create separate SAME codes within an individual county. For a county like Sussex, the county could be further divided into 9 areas and each has their own code. Therefore, Georgetown (center of the county) would have their own code where Laurel and Delmar (southwest county) would have their own and likewise, so would Rehoboth and Lewes (east county). This method has not been deployed officially, but I do encourage FEMA and the National Weather Service to work on deploying this method of narrowing down affected areas in alerts. Such a system would benefit Low Power FM radio stations, Low Power TV stations, cable television systems and wireless phone users and further prevent widespread panic over a very localized incident.

The bottom line, EAS did work in this case. The residents of Georgetown did receive the alerts on radio, TV and their phones. The problem was that so did the rest of the State of Delaware. A few years ago, there was an incident in Hawaii where the “wrong button” was pushed and what was intended to be a training exercise turned into an incoming missile warning sent to the entire state. It is very clear that agencies such as DEMA do not have clear training to their staff on proper procedures for using IPAWS. There also appears to be a jurisdictional breakdown. Why doesn’t the Town of Georgetown have their own IPAWS access? There are statewide issues (including AMBER alerts) that are best going through DEMA, but there are also very localized events, such as this one, that would have been best handled by local authorities instead of a request being relayed to Dover where it was mishandled.

I do hope the IPAWS Team at FEMA reviews this situation and provides proper training updates to IPAWS users.

1. This alert was sent out as LEW (Law Enforcement Warning). Normally, this code is used for cases where there is criminal activity going on. It is not the appropriate SAME code to use for an industrial accident. The SAME protocol has two possible codes that could have been used: HMW (Hazardous Materials Warning) or SPW (Shelter In Place Warning).