Re: I may be weird, but...
>I would think it far better to risk false alerts
Problem 1 is you look like incompetent boobs and risk the classic "Cry Wolf" syndrome.
Problem 2 is if people actually take you seriously there are real world consequences.
RWCs is the reason Houston was NOT evacuated during Hurricane Harvey this past summer. They had a pretty good idea some place near Houston would get gobsmacked...but not exactly sure where.
Hurricane Harvey claimed about 80 lives in the Houston area.
Hurricane Rita had claimed 113 lives -- 107 of which were attributed directly to the chaos caused by the evacuation orders issued for that storm.
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FWIW, Massachusetts has a world-class civil defense organization.
Separate systems for Test & Prod, takes two on-duty operators to initiate the process, and then one of the top 3 executives of the agency has to approve it, presumably with the job requirement one of the three is always available in a relatively developed part of the state so they can be reached easily.
(And hopefully they have the "break glass in case of emergency and rip open this envelope" with the backup authorization codes for when Bob & Joe are on vacation and Fred just died of a heart attack)
Point being it would take deliberate collusion and just not a normal confused cock-up to send a false alert.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
