A crisis that flunked the emergency broadcast test in a big way
by Beth Teitell

Thursday, October 4, 2001

Everyone has heard of the Emergency Broadcast System. I have one question: What are they saving it for?

On the morning of Sept. 11, planes were crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rumors of other planes seeking targets were swirling. The population was terrified. The airwaves were filled with anchors and correspondents reporting the devastation.

Yet there was a strange silence. Where was the obnoxious tone? The striped test-pattern bars? The deep voice-over telling me, for the first time after all these years, ``This is not a test''?

Personally, I think this emergency qualified. Am I a wimp? Or does the guy in charge of flicking the switch have nerves of steel? Was he thinking, Kids these days, they think everything's an `emergency.'?

Earlier this week I called the ``they'' behind the Emergency Broadcast System to ask: ``What would it take?

A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission, talking on ``background,'' told me, ``that's a decision made by FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the White House,'' but he did allow that there was concern about ``panicking'' people.

Are we to believe that the emergency broadcast is only used in non-emergency situations, then?

People in this country might not know much - some of this year's Miss America finalists couldn't identify the preamble to the Constitution - but if there's one thing we do know, it's the emergency broadcast message:

``This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, the attention signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news or instructions.''

Like everyone else, I felt kind of good about having memorized that little tidbit, but now I realize how shallow my knowledge really was. When was the EBS started? I didn't know. Has it ever been used for real? Again, I didn't know. I didn't even know that a few years ago, in 1998, the system was upgraded to facilitate and broaden transmission, and is now called the Emergency Alert System, not the Emergency Broadcast System, or that the familiar test pattern stripes are gone.

Like ``Shear Madness'' and Martha Stewart, the EAS seems like something that's always been with us. But it hasn't. The Truman administration established a precursor to warn of an attack, and under President Kennedy the system was expanded. The idea was to give the president a way to address the nation in times of national emergency.

A FEMA project manager said the events of Sept. 11 were definitely an ``emergency,'' but there was no need to activate the emergency system because the president had access to the country via the media.

The system has never been used for a nuclear emergency, although it has been busy. Between 1976 and 1996, the FCC received 20,341 reported activations, 85 percent of them for weather-related emergencies.

Of course, meteorologists like Harvey Leonard and Todd Gross could provide the information, but sometimes the warnings are issued in the middle of the night, and, apparently in the interest of letting their guys get some sleep (or more time to work on those maps), local TV stations simply broadcast the warning as it's issued by a federal or local agency, such as the National Weather Service.

``The last time we activated the EAS,'' Channel 7's director of public relations, Ro Dooley, told me, ``was a few years ago, when an emergency alert came from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) about a winter storm. It came at about 2 a.m. and meteorologists are not in the building at that hour.''

Meanwhile, on Sept. 12, a day after the terrorist attacks, broadcasters got a memo from the FCC telling them they could suspend testing the system without facing penalties. But earlier this week, on Tuesday, the voluntary suspension ended, and testing resumed.

This is a test. Only a test. Had it been an actual emergency, Peter Jennings or Greta Van Susteren would have appeared on your screen.