A National Weather Service meteorologist said improving technology will enhance the alerts that set some Vermonters’ phones abuzz this weekend with an unusual alert: the threat of snow squalls.
Across much of the state, Vermonters’ clear Saturday was disrupted by the snow squall flurries that created sudden white-out conditions — and for thousands of residents in northern regions, the first emergency alert of its kind in recent memory, according to Pete Banacos, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Burlington office.
The three alerts on Saturday were initiated by Banacos’s office, which typically sends such weather emergency notifications through a system called Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEA, he said. The technology targets phones in a geographic area.
Impending snow squalls can form dangerous icy cold fronts, disorient drivers and lead to pileups on the highway. The conditions were considered to be dangerous enough to merit the first squall alert for Vermont in years, Banacos said.
But after the weather service encountered a technical problem, it contacted Vermont Emergency Management, the division of the state Department of Public Safety that oversees emergency response, according to spokesperson Mark Bosma. Emergency management then distributed one of the snow squall alerts on Saturday on the weather service’s behalf, Bosma said.
“(The National Weather Service) is typically the alerting authority for weather related matters, so this was an unusual circumstance as far as (Vermont Emergency Management) pressing the button,” Bosma said.
That notification was sent to some 21,000 subscribers who opted in to the agency’s VT-Alert system, which uses a technology platform called Everbridge, plus an unknown number of people via the Wireless Emergency Alerts, Bosma said.
He said it was the first time the state agency used WEA technology in years. The alert targeted several counties — Addison, Caledonia, Chittenden, Essex, Franklin, Grand Isle, Lamoille, Orleans and Washington — in whole or part, he said.
Among those who were notified was Burlington resident Dustin Chertoff, who said he received the third snow squall alert of the day at 6:45 p.m. — after he had already driven home through a whiteout.
“At first it was just like driving through a flurry, but after a couple minutes it turned into a complete whiteout. There was a pickup truck in front of me. You couldn’t make out its tail lights 20 feet ahead. Driving 15 mph felt like I was speeding,” he said.
The buzzing on his cellphone and hundreds of others functioned similarly to Amber Alerts, which spread the word of missing children — prompting some chiding on Reddit from users who thought the alerts were overblown. But Chertoff did not mind the noise, only wishing the alert had come sooner.
“I would rather get a weather alert that ends up being not a big deal than the other way around,” he said.
Indeed, Bosma said, Vermont Emergency Management utilizes alerts in “life safety emergencies only” — and the National Weather Service had determined the squalls were just that.
“If you’ve ever driven through one,” Bosma said, “you know full well how dangerous they can be.”
Vermont Emergency Management has been using VT-Alert since 2013 to send Vermonters emergency information to their cellphones, emails or home phones. Users can choose which alerts they receive and how, and for which specific geographic area, according to information on the VT-Alert website.
Alerts range from road conditions to boil-water orders, and users can adjust their preferences. Bosma said “only two or three people” at the Vermont Emergency Management have the privileges to send alerts on the agency’s behalf.
While Bosma said the technology worked well on the state agency’s end, an official with the weather service in Burlington acknowledged the technical hiccups on Saturday and said the WEA technology could be improved.
Its effectiveness often depends on what kind of phone you have, Banacos said. Newer phones have more effective geotargeting and the system “can cross reference exactly where your phone is relative to where the National Weather Service has issued one of these warnings,” he said.
“So if you’re not inside of the polygon that we issue spatially, or within a 10th of a mile of the polygon, you won’t get the alert,” he said.
That technology is “an adolescent kind of technology, and as it becomes an adult, we’re going to see better features involved including the geotargeting and different things to make sure that the people who are receiving these wireless emergency alerts are the ones that really need to receive it,” Banacos said.
For instance, as cars continue to get technology upgrades, Banacos said he hopes it will be possible to send emergency alerts to car interfaces rather than to cellphones, reducing the need for drivers to take their eyes off the road.
Sending out these notifications also involves a balancing act to make sure people are getting the information when they need it and not losing the importance of it, despite the intensity of the delivery, he said.
“We don’t want to send one of these at night when people are sleeping because again, it’s going to affect people that aren’t on the roads,” Banacos said.
Ethan Weinstein contributed reporting.
