TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Tests the Emergency Broadcast System

and I talk about the emergency broadcast system. It's that wonderful system that is it's truly valuable, but I remember vividly as a child being startled every single time it would come on television. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you gotta listen to this episode. Have a little trip back in time. Originally, this episode aired on August first, two thousand twelve, so I hope you enjoy this classic episode. Tech Stuff tests the emergency broadcast system.

So we wanted to do an episode about the emergency broadcast system. This was actually a request that was sent in by a couple of different listeners, which is interesting because it doesn't really technically exist anymore. Now we have a new system in the United States called the Emergency Alert System. Also, I should apologize to all of our listeners from places other than the United States. This is a very United States centric podcast, but it's interesting anyway,

trust me. Well, it's it's become something that's uh that's important in most situations too. I mean they're they're uh tragedies and big events that happen in places all over the world, so that the question is you've got a country, um, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be the United States. We have a country, have millions of people living there, and something is happening, there's an earthquake or a tsunami or uh some other kind of accident, um, or another

country is invading or something like that. You know, something big where you need to tell people, hey, look out, there's something you need to evacuate. You need to get out of there. How do you rests so many people in a short time? Now for the United States, what inspired this was the need to reach out to people during World War two, um, and there wasn't a system

and its subsequently the Cold War. Yeah yeah, well, I mean the the whole uh, the end of the the Second World War and it of course with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan and um, you know, it was apparent because other countries had that technology pretty much right away, and that that The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began shortly after that, and then there was a UM there was a big fear in the United States, but about UM, what would

happen if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack on the United States? How do you warn people? And they said, well, you know, judging by what we did in World War Two, that was fairly effective. But we need a system. We need we need to plan, we need to figure out how we can do this effectively and let everybody know in a short period of time because we're not going to have long we need to have a short period of time a message in place. How can we reach

out to people? And that was basically the birth of UM. What now is the Emergency Alert System. But at that point UH was known as Connell rad Yes, UH in fact, which wasn't by the way, kind of sort of an acronym for a control of electromagnetic radiation, which is that's kind of terrifying, right, But that was established in one by under the administration of Harry S. Truman. Quick Quick Quick Trivia was the S stand for nothing, that's right.

Harry S. Truman stood for nothing. No, that's not right. Nothing. He just wanted it. He liked it sort of, you know, like Michael J. Fox. So you don't say like the S stands for nothing, Like nothing isn't spelled with S. I don't mean to confuse you. The S doesn't mean anything. So control of electromagnetic radiation getting back on track. Prior to nine teen fifty one, these alerts went out over

radio stations. They would get like an emergency bulletin, and it was pretty much up to the station whether or not they read it. Um conal Red kind of established a specific protocol that needed to be followed in the event of an emergency, and originally the idea was that it would alert citizens of the United States of an

impending attack from the Soviet Union. In those days, we're talking about before intercontinental ballistic missiles, So these attacks would take the form of bombers flying overhead, and so conal Red had two main purposes. Really, one was to issue alerts to citizens to try and get them to safety as soon as possible in the case of the attack, and the second was to minimize the ability of the Soviets to target uh specific areas based on radio frequencies.

So part of the connal Red protocol was that radio stations would shut down and they would only uh broadcast in a certain amount of time and under certain frequencies. So under the Comrade protocol you essentially had this. This is what would happen if if someone were to issue an alert. By the way, no alert was ever issued.

It was originally called a key station system, and the idea was that you had these dedicated telephone circuits that connected the air defense control centers to certain key radio stations called basic key stations. If there were an appending attack, the Air Defense Control center would issue the alert to the key radio stations, these basic key stations that would

then issue that same alert to relay key stations. These would be smaller regional radio stations, uh so they it was sort of a hierarchy, right, It went from Air defense control centers to a certain number of basic radio stations to every other radio station. Once they received the alert, the radio stations would then broadcast a predetermined message out

to the listeners. And the way it would work is that the stations would turn off for five seconds, so they'd stopped transmitting for five seconds, come back on for five seconds, go off for five more seconds, then come on and transmit a tone for fifteen seconds. Now, this was the the audible alert saying something is up. You get the predetermined message. Uh, actually we're really What you had to do was tuned to one of two frequencies. There was a frequency they killer Hurts frequency and the

twelve forty kill Hurts frequency. Now, these two frequencies were the only two that were authorized to broadcast during one of these emergencies, and uh, on radios at the time, you would see this little symbol over those those frequencies, and it was a triangle inside a circle, and that's the Civil Defense mark. Yeah, you might remember the symbol sort of red, white and blue if you've seen it around and uh it's still not terribly uncommon to see

it every once in a while someplace. So yeah, but that was that was saying like, these are the two frequencies. If you if your favorite radio station is an on, tune into this station because this is where the information is going to come from. Uh. It was not the best system for a couple of different reasons. One was that it was prone to false alarms if like an electrical storm could set off a false alarm because you're

talking about electricity and radio frequencies. There is a relationship there and we have talked about that extensively on this podcast. So listen to our episodes about radio to learn more about electromagnetism, radio waves and electricity because I can't go into it here. But the the lightning strikes could cause false alarms, which is, you know, a bad thing if if you've been told that this alert system means that there's an impending attack from Soviet planes, it might cause

a little stress. Also, the switching mechanism, because it would make transmitters switch on and off in this this um the sequence could cause transmitters to fail over time, just from powering up and powering down so frequently within a certain amount of time. And then of course, uh, this whole system, this idea of cutting off radio contact so that you could minimize the ability for Soviets to target

in on specific regions. It became meaningless once intercontinental ballistic missiles became a real thing, right because now you're not talking about planes anymore. You're talking about guided missiles and

um or at least targeted missiles. So it became clear that connal red was starting to no longer be very relevant, so they the government started to think, well, what can we do that will provide a similar method for us to message out emergency notices, but use a different approach, And that was what sort of led into the development of the Emergency Broadcast System e b S YEP. In nine EBS made its debut um and uh again it it never was used, of course, to uh, to communicate

the threat of war, not on purpose. We'll get there, but I'm assuming that you listened to the Wow that was fun. Um, we'll get to that. But yeah, I mean it was a much more robust system. Um. And it's during the Kennedy administration for those of you keeping track, yep, yep and um. One of the nice things about it is uh here again, well you could kind of tell kind of judge the mood too. Um. If you had heard something come over conald Rad, you probably immediately would

have thought war. But EBS was actually used for other things too. I remember weather alerts coming in using the exact same thing, and so you would hear and this was used on multiple radio stations. You didn't necessarily have to tune into one radio station to get your information. It would be broadcast over TV and radio because you no longer had to worry about that targeting issue. Then meant that all the stations could be used instead of having to tune into a specific one while everything else

is turned off. And hey, that's more effective anyway to reach people. Um. But yeah, you would hear this this tone, which it's hard to explain it if you've never heard it. You're splitting other than e're splitting and annoying between but it does get your attention. Apparently it's the combined as sign waves of eight hundred and fifty three hurts and nine sixty hurts specifically chosen because it does grab your attention because it's very jarring to hear it. It's just

you you can't ignore it. If you can hear you can't ignore it. That's that's true. Um. And of course, uh, those of us who are familiar with it other than you know, being living somewhere where they're multiple weather uh

situations like tornadoes or tornadoes. Yeah, no kidding, Um, you would probably have heard this through the the alerts which Jonathan and I grew up with, which was yeah, they would say they would come on and say, well, this is a test of the emergency broadcast system, and for the next sixty seconds, we will be testing out the emergency broadcast system. It would there was actually a very specific script that would fall and then there would be

after they would tell you there's a test coming. They would play this tone, and then there'd be another message that would appear at the end saying this was a test of the emergency broadcast system. If this had been a real emergency, you would have received more information at this point alerting you to blah blah blah, blah blah, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming type stuff. And they were required to do this test once in a week. Yeah, regular, on a regular basis. I didn't

think it was quite that frequently. It was once a week unless you had actually had to issue a real alert. If you had to issue a real alert, you could skip over some time. But it was once a week at essentially a random time between eight thirty in the morning and sunset at night, uh sometime during the week. So it wasn't that we'll get into this too. There wasn't a time where every single station had to do

it at the same time. It was unique to various stations, and like you were saying, Chris, you know these alerts

went out not just for a national emergency. In fact, they never went out on purpose for a national emergency instead, uh so so never it was never used purposefully for that reason, even though that was the genesis of this system, it was used more than oh, I don't know, several thousand times to alert for civil emergencies, sometimes an alert about to be on the lookout for a suspect in a in a particularly nasty crime that could be an alert, or for the weather, alerts like the ones that Chris

and I grew up with. I can remember that happening so many times. Deep this is just a test of the fact that we're gonna go listen to a sponsor now. The way the emergency broadcast system worked was that the only message that no station could ignore or was supposed

to ignore, was a national one. Right, So, if you are a radio station in the middle of nowhere and the national alert goes out, you were supposed to to broadcast it just like every other station in the country, Whereas if it were a local or regional you may or may not have been able to ignore that message.

And not broadcast it. The way it worked was that, again like the Connel red system, where you had the key stations, the basic key stations, and the relay key stations, there was a similar setup for the emergency broadcast system. You had these primary points of contact, which would be major broadcast stations usually, but these primary points of contact had to issue all broadcast all the alerts they got. They had no choice because they were a primary point

of contact. But if you were further down the chain, like you are a secondary point or further down, then you could elect whether or not to broadcast that alert, assuming it wasn't a national alert that was the only one. Of course, everyone had to broadcast. So um, you know there were that explains why you might be in an area where a weather service alert is being broadcast and you saw it on one channel, but you switched to another local channel and there's nothing that could be why it.

Maybe that that other channels not a primary point and therefore was not required to broadcast it. Um. Now, the the incident that Jonathan mentioned, famous incident, Now I read an account of this from a person who was working at a radio station in St. Louis at the time. It happened. Um. At the time it happened, by the way, is February nine, yep. And what he had said was that every Saturday at ten thirty three, the radio stations would receive a test message from Cheyenne Mountain and Colorado.

And so basically it would say and there was a code word that it would include that would let you know that it was was genuine. And so at ten thirty three, um, there there was a teletype machine in the other room, and he heard it and and typically it would it would dig a couple of times to let you know, hey, there's something something on the wire, you know, a news story on the wire. But this

one rang ten times, which he knew was a big deal. Um. And so he ran into the other room and got a message that said he needed to broadcast a warning that there was an announcement coming from the national you know, from the federal government and it was something bad and impending, and be on the alert because it was time to broadcast a message. But they really weren't told what that message was, what it was. Well, here's the hateful, hateful, the you know, which was a code word, meaning that

the code that was actually a code word. The hateful was a code word that meant there's a messages coming up, there's an attack coming up, but more details will follow. Go ahead and initiate the alert system. And it was a mistake that was made by a teletype operator who sent this authenticated code out to the system, which meant it went to all those those primary points of contact, and it didn't say it didn't say a minute later, oops,

my bad. No, no, it took a while, and in fact, the first time they tried to resend it, they sent the wrong code, so it didn't resend the message. It was only forty minutes after the initial message was sent

out that the cancelation, the correct cancelation went out. So what happened was actually very telling in a way because some radio, radio and television stations, actually a lot of them didn't do anything at all, so they did not broadcast this message, and that, in a way is a problem because the whole purpose of the system is to

relay a national emergency to everybody. Now. Now, in many of these cases, it may be that the people in charge said, there's no information here, we have no real I mean, it's a confirmed code, but there's no confirmed information. And we have nothing to share with people, So why would we go ahead and do this when we don't have any information we could give them. Yeah, they were standing by to broadcast whatever the major announcement was about

the attack. Right. Some of them hadn't even signaled the alert, right, They just the programming just kept on going, But other stations did. Some of them didn't know what to do, so some of them weren't doing it on purpose. Some of them weren't doing it because they didn't know what they were supposed to do. And a few actually broke into programming and said, we've received an alert from the Emergency Broadcast System. We know that there is a national emergency.

We're awaiting for more information. Please stand by. And what Chris was talking about earlier was there are there a couple of recordings on the internet you can listen to that we're taken from that day, and one of them is um AND radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana called w O w OH, and you can listen to that and you can find it on the internet. The actual it's snippets from that. Yeah, it's it's been edited. It's sorry, it's been edited down so that you get uh sections

the important sections of of the broadcast. It's about what six minutes or so long, right, keeping in mind that that whole window was more like forty minutes. So this is six minutes of footage footage from six minutes of content from that forty minute window. Yeah. So basically what it said was, you know, hey, there there's something coming up. It's it's um. It's one of those things that would be funny if it weren't. If you don't put yourself

back at that time, it would have been terrifying. It would have been terrifying because he's the person who was on the air. Was a you could tell, was it, uh, seasoned newsperson? Yeah, yeah, he Uh. He was very serious and said, you know, there's there's been a message. We're waiting word for what's going on. Uh. If you are listening and you are one of our reporters, come here immediately.

We need you here right now. And and basically was talking, uh, not only to the audience, but to the the other reporters who might be listening. The message itself actually said, um message authenticator, hatefulness, hatefulness. This is an emergency action notification directed by the President normal broadcasting will cease immediately. All stations will broadcast e A N message one preceded

by the attention signal. Per FCC rules, only stations holding nd N D e A may stay on the air and according and accord with state E B S plan. And UH that would have scared the pants off of me. Um. And it took a while, as Jonathan said, Uh, you know, kill e A N message. It was sent in error and it took a while for it to UH to show up. But the person he the person who I was, I was reading, I should have gotten the the U R L if I can find it real quick for

you guys, I will um. The the person who was, who has actually posted photos of UH scans of his copies of these messages, was saying, excuse the burn marks. I was smoking pretty heavily through this instance, because I

think it was kind of stressed out. If you listen to the recording from the w O w O U incident, you actually hear the the newscaster kind of chuckling once the once the order was sent out about this was a mistake, and you know, kind of kind of because you know, clearly it was one of those stressful things and the chuckling is him releasing that stress, and it is an interesting moment in history to kind of pick

up on that. Um. So yeah, not that was the only time that a national alert went out across the system, and again it wasn't a real one. It was a mistake. UM. And then what was supposed to happen is that, depending upon the nature of the emergency, UH, stations are supposed to read from a predetermined script like it's it's They're not supposed to just you know, kind of i'd commentary on it. There's a specific message that needs to be relayed.

And so that was the general purpose of the Emergency Broadcast system, but it was starting to show its age uh sparticularly in the nineties because you started to have other methods of getting content on your television besides broadcast TV, and the emergency Broadcast system really affected radio and broadcast television. So there needed to be an overhaul of the system, and that's what happened in the late nineties and in nt you had the Emergency Alert System take its place.

And now you might say, well, what's the difference. Well, for one thing, it doesn't just include broadcast stations. It also includes cable and participating satellite systems. So now you've got other methods of broadcast or or you know, other methods of getting content over your television included in this. So that way, if a citizen is watching cable television or something on satellite TV, they could still have access to an emergency message because clearly, you know, you don't

want to leave everybody out. As as people have more and more ways of watching stuff, it's harder to reach them in a centralized way. Yeah, these these systems were developed to run on AM and FM radio and the local broadcast stations. So now we've gone from in the United States, UM, let's say, on average, probably three or four regular network broadcast stations, maybe a couple independence in the larger you know, larger cities, something in the ultra

high frequency. Yeah, you know, maybe uh six or six to ten stations in big big markets. UM. Then you go to dozens or even hundreds of stations now with cable and satellite, UM, you know, plus uh you know the radio stations which have exploded in number, UM, satellite

radio and all the other media that we listen to. Now, so yeah, the system, there's a lot of people know the system needed to to evolve with that development, and of course even now we're still we're already seeing a need for that too, find another way of reaching people because as people start to use the Internet to get content, now there's yet another avenue for information to get to them. But you know, this system was not designed with that

in mind, so there's already another need coming out. We've got a little bit more to say about the emergency broadcast system. Don't worry, there's no emergency going on. We're just taking a quick break to thank our sponsor. The way it works now, the National Weather Service actually has specific codes that they can attached to notices so that those digital codes will send the message just to the

relevant regions. So that way, if there if the National Weather Service detects that there's going to be you know, a massive hurricane hitting the panhandle of Florida, it and send an alert to say, Texas and Florida and you know, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, all those areas that could potentially be affected by heavy rains, winds, that sort of stuff, and the rest of the nation is unaffected or even the rest you know, the rest of certain states like the northern part of the state

might not be affected because they're far enough away from the coast where at least it's not gonna be an immediate effect. They might not get the message either. Uh. And it's so that the right information gets to the right people. And it makes sense, you know, you don't want to send out a message to the entire nation that for something is just going to affect a relatively small um area of the nation as a whole. United States is big, so uh, yeah, it was. It's something

that that has evolved over time. The and the other thing I was going to talk about was what happened on November nine. Yeah, Um, there is one sort of interesting footnote um to the the e B S ERA

passing from to the E A S era UM. E B S was not activated during the September eleven, two thousand and one attacks, um, which is kind of interesting that they chose not to do, uh to use the alert at that time, particularly since the attacks affected multiple targets in multiple cities, so it would have affected even more had not the flight in Pennsylvania gone down. So just just sort of an interesting footnote there. Um. But yes, on November nine, Uh, the e a S made its debut. Yeah,

and the system had been in place. But what happened was because the system was was the e A S was actually what would have been used in September eleven. So on November, what happened was it was tested nationally.

This was the first time any of these systems had ever been tested on a national level, meaning that every participating station was going to display the test at the same time, and that time was going to be um It was two pm Eastern for on November, which means that if you didn't know about it ahead of time and he turned on your television, you would see this alert and you think, oh, this is irritating. This that one of those stupid tests, and change the channel and

that alert is still going and it's going on the ocean. Oh, this is something. And so there were a lot of messages that were sent out before two pm November to let people know, Hey, this is gonna happen. Don't worry. The zombies aren't here yet, right, or whatever other national emergency you might be able to conjure up in your mind.

I just cannot imagine a national emergency at this point that does not involve zombies, right, right, well there are According to the Christian Science Monitor, UM, there were fourteen thousand and more podcast stations both for TV and radio, plus more than uh ten thousand cable TV stations. So this is all being done at the same time. UM, and uh it's able to reach a lot more people. But they're already talking about, um, how they can reach

people via text message and in other locations. UM. You know, they're they're already talking again about how they can improve this this system to make it reach more people. UM, which is uh, you know, kind of funny since it probably reaches more now than it ever has before. UM. But I can imagine that it's going to do things like promoted tweets. Yeah, yeah, well there you laugh. But I can easily imagine that it's just you know, and

I absolutely see it. Um and it Uh. It's also important to to realize that this does more than just announced state an attack like connal rad would. Um. There are more and I believe eighty different kinds of messages they can use the e A s for, including things

like childhood abduction alerts. Yes, and uh. Here here in Atlanta, we have a highway that goes around the outside of the city known as the perimeter obvious reasons, Yeah, highway or Interstate eighty five, And there are electronic signs that they can use, and a lot of a lot of times you'll see stuff like, well there's a traffic up ahead, or be you know, be aware there's an accident um. But they also use this messaging on those signs as well. So that's a way for people to uh, for the

authorities to reach us with these kinds of messages. On the side, note, how can a highway that encircles a city that's all within one state be an interstate? Jonathan, I'm just asking these are questions that appear that that happened in my head, and I want to know why do you drive on a parkway in parking and driveway? I also want to know that I don't name these things, I just report them. If our legs bent backwards, what would the chair look like? What if there were no

hypothetical questions? That's terrible, all right, So now now that we've totally killed that, but yeah, the the ass is supposed to be able to turn on certain types of radios and TVs and other devices to allow people to receive these emergency messages, which of course will inspire many people to go you know, the government is trying to take over our world, um, which is all right for them to say, I suppose, but UM yeah, I mean they're they're ways for for them to reach us in

to let us know if there's something important that we should be aware of. Um. So you know, it really has involved quite a bit since the nineteen fifties when the first system was put into place, and similar systems to this are in place in other countries around the world. We specifically focus on this one because it's the country we live in. So again, apologies to all of our listeners overseas. Hopefully this was interesting to you, just on on the level of how do you take something as

simple in in concept as getting a message out? How do you take that and then apply it to a very complex world. And uh, it's an interesting approach. It's not necessarily the best one either. There may be other approaches that would be um that would be more efficient and more effective than the emergency alert system, but you know,

that's what we have. So if you guys live in a country that has a similar system but it works on a different way, let us know, tell us, tell us about it, you know, if you're familiar with that kind of thing, because I find it really interesting. I mean, it's a very important concept and it's, like I said,

this is not the only way to get it to work. Yeah, and it's it's a challenge to reach that many people, UM in a in a very short time, to let them know that there's something big and important that they need to know it's a matter of public safety or a public concern. We've definitely come a long way for um A guy on horseback writing yelling out the British are coming, The British are coming. Well, guys, I hope

you enjoyed this classic episode of tech Stuff. It was fun to go back and revisit this, uh, this, this system that again. It's very important, kind of scary, kind of interesting. And let me know if it hit any nostalgia buttons for you. Let me know what you guys thought, and if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a person

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