H.R. 7043: Emergency Reporting Act

This bill requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to publicly report on certain activations of the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS). DIRS is a reporting system, activated during severe weather and other events impacting communications service, through which communications providers report outages and other degradations to service.

If the system was activated for at least seven days, the FCC must issue a preliminary a report that includes (1) the number and duration of any service outages, (2) the approximate number of users or the amount of infrastructure potentially affected by a service outage, and (3) the number and duration of any outages at public safety answering points (PSAPs) that prevent the PSAPs from receiving and routing emergency calls. The FCC must also hold at least one public field hearing in the area affected by the event, and it must issue a final report that includes recommendations on how to improve the resiliency of affected networks.

Separately, the FCC must publish a general report on (1) the volume and nature of 9-1-1 outages that are not required to be reported under current outage notification rules, and (2) the value to public safety agencies of the inclusion of visual information in outage notifications from communications providers.

Written by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress.