Topic

Best practices for using IPAWS Alerting.

Description

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) comprise the IPAWS alerting network. IPAWS alerts are often viewed as the pathway to delivering the most critical and time-sensitive alerts.

The following steps will help an IPAWS Alert sender gain confidence in their alerting proficiency in updating and cancelling a WEA Alert.

Important IPAWS Best Practices

Text Formatting Precautions

When creating IPAWS alert messages, be cautious with characters from Microsoft Word or Outlook. Specifically, apostrophes and quote marks can cause unexpected results and may cause message delivery to fail. Avoid copy-pasting text directly from Word or Outlook. Messages typed manually in an alerting tool or created with Notepad/Notepad++ are less likely to cause issues.

IPAWS Proficiency Demonstration Requirement

To maintain access to the IPAWS Live environment, you must send at least one successful WEA (Wireless Emergency Alert) and/or EAS (Emergency Alert System) message to the IPAWS Lab Test/Demo environment each month. This is called a 'Proficiency Demonstration'. Effective September 1, 2023, organizations missing 3 or more consecutive Proficiency Demos will have their IPAWS Live environment access disabled until they complete a successful demonstration.

Verifying a Successful Send

Once you've published a WEA Alert, you should verify that the message was successfully sent and received by the IPAWS gateway.

To check this:

1. Navigate to Incidents > Open/History.

2. Click on the Incident name from the list.
   

3. The Incident Details page will open. Click on the title of the message in the Notifications section.
   

4. At the bottom of the Notification Details page, there will be three tabs. Click CAP Channels.
   

   • Check that the publishing status is 600 – Message successfully sent to WEA.

   • If you used a polygon, the number of polygons sent and the number of polygons used will appear under the publishing status. This helps you understand that your polygon was published, and it did not go countywide.
     

Cancel or Update IPAWS Alerts from Universe

The simplest way to cancel or update an IPAWS alert is from the Universe tab, which by default is accessible to all roles except the Incident Operator.

To cancel or update an IPAWS alert from Universe:

1. Click on the Universe tab, then on the IPAWS widget on the left side of the screen.
   

2. Enter your IPAWS credentials as required by the pop-up on the screen.
   

3. Once you've entered your IPAWS credentials, your WEA message will appear on the left side of the screen. Click Show on Map to bring your polygon back into the Update or Cancel alert.
   

4. Click Send Follow Up.
   

5. Once you've clicked Send Follow Up, the message will be on the left and your selected polygon on the right of the page. Add text to the All Delivery Methods section.
   

6. Add your IPAWS credentials.
   

7. If you're UPDATING the alert, the UPDATE message type will be the default message type. If you need to CANCEL the alert, you will need to manually change the Update to Cancel by clicking the down arrow to select it from the dropdown.
   

8. Add your UPDATE Message to the required WEA fields.
   

9. Once you've added your UPDATE/CANCEL message, scroll down the page. In the Polygon field, you will see the "You have selected polygons" in green. This indicates the polygon to the right has been added to this message.
   

10. Continue to the bottom of the page and click Send.
    

11. You will receive an IPAWS Follow Up pop-up informing you that the Follow Up will be listed in the Active/History tab under NOTIFICATIONS (not Incidents).
    

12. Before logging out, you should verify the alert has been successfully sent by logging into the message details and verifying the following:
    

    • You received a Publishing Status of 600.

    • Your IPAWS polygon was successful.

    • Your message type is UPDATE or CANCEL.