On November 12, APCO met with representatives from the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to discuss proposed templates to translate Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) into multiple languages. These templates would be pre-installed on mobile devices in the 13 most common U.S. languages, thus enabling public safety agencies to expand the reach of WEAs to non-English speakers. At the Bureau’s request, APCO provided recommendations on the 9-1-1 outage template, such as including the capability of providing an alternative method to reach 9-1-1, the location of the 9-1-1 outage and an embedded URL.
