TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Tests the Emergency Broadcast System

the Emergency Broadcast System. Chris Pilette and I decided to sit down and really learn about the history of the emergency broadcast system. What does it really mean? And maybe you've actually turned on the TV when one of those tests were going on and wondered what the heck is happening. This show should answer all those questions, So take it away, Chris and younger me. So, we wanted to do an

episode about the emergence see 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 address 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 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 was known as connal 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 kind of terrifying, right, But that was established in ninety 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. Wait, no, that's not right. Nothing. He

just wanted it. He liked it sort of, you know, like Michael J. 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 ninety one, these alerts went out over radio station. 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 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 had 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 kill hurts frequency and the 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 isn't 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 UH, 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 uh 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 ne 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 but I'm assuming that you listened to the w

O w 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 you're splitting and annoying between it does get your attention. Apparently, it's the combined the 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 testing. Yeah, they would say they would come on and say, well, this is a test of the emergency broadcast system and 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 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 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, 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 the various stations. And like you were saying, us, 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. Well. The uh 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 Connell 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 That explains why you might be in an area where a weather service alert is being broadcast, asked, and you saw it on one channel, but you switched to another local channel, and

there's nothing that could be why. It may be that that other channels not a primary point and therefore was not required to broadcast it. Beebe. This is not a test. This is actually us going into a commercial break. See you on the flip side. 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.

And what he had said was that every Saturday at ten thirty three, the radio stations would receive a test message from Cheyenne Mountain in 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, see here's the thing. 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 message is 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 a waiting for more information. Please stand by. And what Chris was talking about earlier was there are a couple of recordings on the internet you can listen to that were taken from that day. And one of them is from an radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana called w ow OH, and you can listen to that and you can find it on the internet. The actual it's snippets from that. 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, 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, I 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 scans of his copies of these messages, was saying, excuse the burn marks. I was smoking pretty heavily through this incidents. It was kind

of stressed out. If you listen to the recording from the w O w oh 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 provide commentary on it. There's a specific message that needs to be relayed and um.

So that was the general purpose of the Emergency Broadcast System, but it was starting to show its age, UH, particularly 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 ninety eight 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 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. Chris and I have a bit more to say about the emergency broadcast system, but first let's take another quick break. 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 can 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 it's 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 is 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 fail the E A S was actually what would have been used in September eleven, right, So, so on November what happened was it was tested nationally and 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 you turned on your television, you would see this alert and you think, oh, this is irritating this that one of those stupid tests. Change the channel and that alert is still going and it's going on this 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 broadcast stations, both for TV and radio plus more than uh ten thousand cable TV station 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 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 to improve 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 than I believe

eighty different kinds of messages they can use. The e A s were including things like childhood abduction alerts seen those, yes, And here here in Atlanta, we have a highway that goes around the outside of the city known as the Perimeter Obvious Reasons Highway or Interstate eighty five, and there are electronic signs that they can use 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 have that that happened in my head, and I want to know why do you drive on a

parkway and 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 a chair look like? What if there were no hypothetical questions? Oh 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 nine 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 from a guy on horseback writing yelling out the British are coming, the British are coming, or or fetivities. Yeah, could you run these

twenty six miles right come on between marathonors? Yeah. And if you are interested in uh in hearing the bits about the the e B S accident um search for w O w O U e B S and you'll probably come up with it pretty quickly. Um. The website I mentioned before it is actually STL Radio dot net, slash pages slash e B S accident dot htm. Well that wraps up this discussion about emergency broadcast system and this classic episode from two thousand twelve. I hope you

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