Had This Been an Actual Emergency... Oops!

At 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, during the first nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System, all television channels and radio stations in the United States were supposed to be interrupted by piercing emergency tones. Not a song by Lady Gaga.

But as tests often go, there were some failures, with viewers and listeners [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in many states saying they saw and heard the alerts at the scheduled time, while others did not. Some DirecTV subscribers said they heard Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” when the test was under way. Some Comcast subscribers in northern Virginia said their TV sets were switched over to QVC before the alert was shown.

The federal agencies charged with testing the alert system found that [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] there were flaws, particularly in the system’s connections to cable and satellite distributors. In some cases, the test messages were delayed, perhaps because they were designed to trickle down from one place — the White House in this case — to thousands of stations and distributors.

In Los Angeles, some viewers said the alert, intended for 30 seconds [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], lasted for almost half an hour; in New York, some viewers didn’t see it at all. But many others reported that the alert arrived right on time and ended right away.

Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Communications Commission said the test “served the purpose for which it was intended — to identify gaps and generate a comprehensive set of data to help strengthen our ability to communicate during real emergencies.” The agencies said they would collect data from stations and distributors and report their conclusions later.

Certainly, viewers and listeners have grown accustomed to hearing the tones [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and reminders — “this is just a test” — when the systems are activated locally each week by broadcasters. But government officials said the national system had never been tested before as a whole.

Announcements about the test were hard to miss. As Michael [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Powell, the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, wrote on Twitter, “No one wants a ‘War of the Worlds’ sequel!”
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On Wednesday, at least, the nation was far from it.