With great fanfare, radio/TV broadcasters and cable television systems conducted the first-ever nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System yesterday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was responsible for initiating the test, apparently did not properly engineer its outgoing feed to broadcasters, leading to an on-air mess when test-time came.
Here in Wisconsin, radio stations broadcast 30 seconds of garbled audio that effectively degenerated into static. Similar results have been reported in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Rhode Island, and Kentucky. In parts of California and South Carolina, the EAS message was apparently cued more than once, leading to a loop/echo effect.
In parts of Texas and Ohio, there was simply silence between the alert and end-of-message tones. Elsewhere in Texas, as well as in parts of Oregon, Alabama, Connecticut and Georgia, broadcasters never got the alert at all.
On the TV side, instead of seeing the EAS test, many Time Warner Cable subscribers found their televisions force-tuned to QVC, while some DirecTV subscribers heard Lady Gaga instead of the test message.
The Emergency Alert System works pretty well at the local and state level, used regularly for events like weather warnings and missing child alerts. But for a nationwide emergency, it’s obviously another story.
EAS replaced the Emergency Broadcast System more than a decade ago. EAS itself is in the process of being upgraded; a new emergency alert protocol is being developed that will disseminate emergency information across more of the information infrastructure, most notably wireless phone networks.
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