“Please don’t argue with the warning system”, Indiana University told a lecturer from its meteorology department as he rightly criticized their communications on Sunday.

Please don't argue with the warning system. Warnings affect the entire county until notified otherwise.

— Indiana University (@IUBloomington) November 5, 2017

Despite being wrong, the university continued to insist that they were making the right choice. Now as a Boilermaker, I’m normally in favor of Indiana University embarrassing itself. But this time, it’s just bad. Warning fatigue can kill people. The false alarm rate is already too high; telling people about warnings that don’t exist only makes it worse.

The “warnings affect the entire county until notified otherwise” statement is only a decade out of date. But I get it, our warning dissemination technology hasn’t caught up with how warnings are issued. You may recall I’ve written a few words on the subject.

The fact that dissemination technology is still (mostly) stuck in a county-based paradigm 10 years after the nationwide implementation of polygon-based warnings is an embarrassment. Emergency management is more than just weather, so I don’t expect emergency managers to know as much as meteorologists. I do expect them to not act silly when they’re corrected by experts. But most of all, I expect things to get better.

I don’t know why I expect things to get better. It’s hard to imagine the large public- and private-sector investments that are necessary to fix the issue. Storm deaths are relatively low, so there’s not even mass tragedy to spur action. It’s much easier to just work around the edges and pretend the glaring issues don’t exist. But if we’re serious about being a Weather-Ready Nation, we need to fix it at some point. Otherwise public institutions will continue making themselves look bad and misinforming the public.