Wireless Emergency Alerts and the Emergency Alert System

In this document, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission) announces that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved a non-substantive change to the information collection associated with Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) rules adopted in a Report and Order issued by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (Multilingual WEA Implementation Report and Order). These rules describe how commercial mobile service providers who participate in WEA (Participating CMS Providers) must implement multilingual templates for the most commonly issued and most time-sensitive types of alerts in English, the next thirteen most commonly spoken languages in the United States, and American Sign Language (ASL). Specifically, Participating CMS Providers shall support the pre-scripted templates published in 90 FR 57288 for eighteen emergency events. For English and the thirteen written languages, Participating CMS Providers must support the inclusion of four fillable elements that customize the pre-scripted alert templates: the name of the sending agency, the location pertaining to the alert message, the time when the emergency conditions described in the alert are expected to end, and an optional URL. When an alert originator sends a non-English template message, Participating CMS Providers must display the corresponding pre-scripted alert message in English after the non-English message.