Emergency Reporting Act

The Emergency Reporting Act directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to enhance its oversight and reporting mechanisms following significant communication disruptions. It mandates that within one year of enactment, and annually thereafter, the FCC must conduct at least one public hearing for events where its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) was activated for a minimum of seven days. These hearings are designed to gather comprehensive input from various stakeholders, including state and local governments, affected residents, communication service providers, and first responders, to understand the impact of such events. Following each public hearing, the FCC is required to issue a detailed report within 120 days. These reports must quantify the number and duration of outages across various services, including broadband internet access , interconnected VoIP, and commercial mobile services, along with the approximate number of affected users and infrastructure. Crucially, the reports must also detail any outages that prevent 9-1-1 emergency communications centers from receiving caller information or routing emergency calls, and include the Commission's recommendations for improving network resiliency. Beyond DIRS-related reporting, the bill also compels the FCC to investigate and propose improvements to general network outage reporting within one year of enactment. This investigation will assess the value of visual information from service providers to public safety agencies regarding outages and examine the volume of 9-1-1 outages that currently go unreported due to existing FCC thresholds. The Commission must then publish a report outlining recommended changes to its rules to address these critical issues, ensuring better situational awareness and response capabilities during emergencies.