Integrated Public Alert and Warning System Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank my friend and the ranking member of the subcommittee for yielding to me on this important bill.

Mr. Speaker, yes, indeed, we have spent a number of years overseeing, holding hearings, and working to push for a more modern public alert warning system. So this legislation is somewhat overdue. In fact, we passed similar legislation last year in the House.

I do support the legislation. However, I will point out that it is a bit irregular because we passed it a year ago, and suddenly we are passing a version which just happens to have come from a Senator who just happened to be one of the most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection so that he can get a notch on his belt. But that is the way things work around here: we get good things done for sometimes the wrong reasons. It should have been done a year ago. The Senate should have taken up our version.

That said, this will modernize the system tremendously. We are well past the days of CONELRAD alerts. Yet, technology has not moved as far as it could for the 21st century.

In particular, I was in Japan with a congressional delegation observing what they have done post the dramatic earthquake and tsunami events. They estimated the wave heights and were able to get the message out, to some extent, on public broadcasts and with sirens before further shocks brought down the grid and silenced, for the most part, the sirens.

Unfortunately, the first estimates were off. When the waves reached the nearshore monitoring devices, they found that they were considerably higher and a much more vigorous evacuation should have been conducted. Unfortunately, at that point they had no way to get the word out to the people who had gone to high ground, but not high enough, or those who had sheltered in place when they believed the height of the tsunami would be less. So they lost many lives, they feel, unnecessarily, because of a lack of redundancy in the system.

This will move us toward a redundant system. They have now moved to a cellular-based system so that individuals can be alerted.

I was just at a tsunami event in the town of Florence, Oregon, called the Blue Line, where they have evacuation routes and people say: When do I stop running or driving?

And so they are painting lines on those critical routes showing what point where you are safe from the highest predicted tsunami. They did, essentially, a drill while we were there, but you couldn't even hear the siren. These are World War II-era raid sirens. Some work, some don't.

So we need a much more robust and redundant system because we know that in the Pacific Northwest and northern California, it is only when--not if--we will have a dramatic earthquake, potentially with a magnitude up to 9, with a subsequent tsunami.

We need in place both deep ocean detection to give more warning time, wave detection, and a robust system to inform the people where to go and how far they need to go in these events. This is overdue legislation, and I do urge its adoption.

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