re: alerts last march, Montréal had a nasty winter storm which resulted in a stretch of highway wheree all exits were blocked for hours (the government had inquiry on what happened). Cars stuck in there in middle of night for 6 hours. Once police woke up, it would have been extremely helpful if they could have broadcasted an alert to all cars in that area, giving them instruction on how to turn around and exit "backwards"). Similarly, in Atlanta, when a piece of highway collapsed, such alerts might have been helpful to all those drivers stuck and unable to proceed (and needing to turn around). But this has to be very targetted to one antenna, not an area. The problem is that people get annoyed by alerts that don't concern them and if they turn it off, then it defeats the purpose for "real" alerts. Last year, where Fort McMurray was hit by forest fires, Canada did not yet have emergency alerts enabled. Twitter and radio were the "official" evacuation orders. (and there were mistakes, underestimating it, mistakes in handling traffic etc). A telling video in case you hadn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC2iPvXAggM Communications systems become extremely important in such emergency events because of the time critical nature. For instance, in Fort McMurray, one neighbourhood had only road out and it was already in teh fire so people evacuating had to go through it. Yet, at intersection with highway, the first responders were slowing traffic exiting from Beacon hill to let highway traffic through, unaware of what was going on on that one exit from beacon Hill neighbourhood (bad neighbourhood design BTW). Had they stopped highway, they could have evacuated neighbourhood quickly instead of forcing cars to be stuck in traffic with fire all around them. And as a sign of the times, many home cameras ran and kept sending surveillance video to some service provider servers as the house burned down until power cut or camera burned. (and some of the evacuated people were able to get cable company to check iof theyr modem was still "there" as a means to find out if their home had burned or not. And while authorities refused to release real information on what areas were damaged or not, Google released "before/after" satellite images so people could check if their home was still there of not. (the information age defeating politicians fears of releasing information). on lighter note: this past summer while on an Amtrak train south of Wilmington, interesting experience to see everyuone's phone beep at roughly same time in train car due to flash flood alert, followed by skies opening up and dumping an ocean on the train.