FEMA Tests Emergency Alert System

Well the big test went down today for the Emergency Alert System, the first national test since the system was put in place years ago. According to the LA times, the emergency warning needs some fine tuning:

The first nationwide test of the emergency warning system failed to reach all television and radio stations in the country, but federal officials said they will make improvements.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, called weaknesses in the system exposed by the test "unacceptable."

You know what we really need to do? Scrap the whole damn project. If we can't get a simple 30 second warning message right after years of planning and God knows how many millions of dollars - AND add to that the fact that we've never needed to use it, let's save ourselves the trouble and money and ditch it altogether. Television and Radio are quickly becoming irrelevant as more and more people stay connected to what's going on via the internet and wireless communication devices. This whole project was a nice idea but this is just another example of the government fucking something up which should be incredibly easy to pull off. And I really don't think the Soviets are going to be invading us any time soon. I'm not sure what we're preparing for anyways, wasn't the mission accomplished on the war on terror? We can all relax now, right?

In case you missed, here's a clip of the National Emergency Broadcast test from earlier today:



They couldn't get any higher quality audio, or video for that matter? What's with the static and the text that looks like a screenshot captured from a computer in the 80s? This is what we've been planning for years? This doesn't need tweaking, it needs to be scrapped. We evidently didn't need this alert system for the 9-11 terror attacks, and if anything comes along that's a bigger deal than that we'll no doubt hear about it from other sources. Thanks for trying though.

Emergency Alert System test scheduled for 1pm today

For the first time ever in history there will be a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) to be conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission. This alert system has been in place for the past 60 years but has never been used. The test will begin at 1pm today and only last for 30 seconds - it was initially going to be 3 minutes long but there were concerns that people would begin to panic and think there was a real emergency.

From Kansascity.com:

Two years in the planning, the minutelong drill is designed to expose weaknesses in a 60-year-old readiness system that has never been used — not even on 9/11.

“Coming from the military, what you do is you prepare for conflict,” Barnett said. “You test your system. You train your folks. When they told me this had never been tested I said, ‘How do you know it works?’ ”

This warning system seems to be a useful thing to have, although evidently we've made it this far just fine without needing it - but we could imagine some scenarios in which it could help. And actually we're glad that this hasn't been used yet, because it's one of those things that could get out of hand very quickly and become overused for events that are barely emergencies.

Now maybe we're being naive here, but just how hard is it for the government to send out an emergency message over television and radio airways? This has been 2 years in planning, really? Of all the great things we're able to accomplish as a nation, somehow sending out a simple 30 second message is this huge endeavor that takes years of planning. It better go right tomorrow because that would really be pathetic if we fucked this up. On the other hand, just how necessary is this type of alert system? Evidently no events in the past 60 years, including the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks, were important or urgent enough to warrant using it. And it seems to me that if anything were to be more serious and more urgent than anything we've ever experienced over the past 60 years, wouldn't the news and television media already be talking about it? Plus with the internet and mobile devices being as commonplace as they are today, people are more connected to current events and up-to-date on emergency information than ever before.

9-11 dispatch centers all across the country are preparing themselves and bracing for a flood of calls from people confused by the warnings, which could make it difficult for people with real emergencies to get through. Let's help everything goes smoothly.