Effective multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS) are critical for achieving the Sendai Framework target of increasing access to disaster risk information. Recent efforts to establish a framework for evaluating the availability and access to MHEWS have tended to focus on basic infrastructure in various countries, with less focus on the spatial and temporal variability of those systems in delivering alerts across jurisdictions. This study presents an analysis of Oregon’s OR-Alert system to evaluate its MHEWS capability.
We examined 31,940 alerts and 11.1 million messages delivered over 12 months of 2024 issued by 35 county groups, 3 tribal groups and 6 state agencies. We analyzed alert distribution patterns, communication methods, geographic coverage and temporal variations, with a particular interest in assessing system applicability for earthquake early warning (EEW) integration.
OR-Alert demonstrates robust capacity potentially reaching over 2 million reported recipients. Natural hazards comprise 75% of public alerts, delivered primarily through short message service (SMS) (52%), with distinct seasonal and geographic patterns corresponding to regional hazard profiles. Push notification adoption remains very low at 2%, posing substantial barriers for time-sensitive earthquake warnings. Geographic analysis reveals marked differences in system enrollment, with some counties having high participation while some populous regions show less than 10% participation.
These findings highlight the need for recruitment efforts to address coverage disparities and for enhanced push notification adoption to enable rapid-onset hazard communication, particularly as the Cascadia region seeks to improve its EEW capabilities.
The evaluation of geographic and temporal alerting patterns provides quantitative information about how MHEWS is functioning across a state with varying hazards both in space and time from a centralized platform that creates a single point of contact. Comparisons with census data provide context for the geographic variations in the alerting data, suggesting that infrastructure availability and language use do not significantly influence communication channel selection.
