Nov. 9 is also the anniversary of Kristalnacht, a/k/a "The night of the broken glass", when in 1938, Nazis went on a countrywide rampage against jewish owned stores and temples. Commonly acknowledged as the begining of the Shoah. Its a bit ironic/spooky.

Bill's got the extra credit. I've always wondered why they still use the straight tone for tornadoes since thats also the test tone. I doubt most people know what those sirens were originally for anyway.




Thats pretty cool Les. Before you mentioned it I hadn't heard of the Ground Observer Corp or the Skywatch program. I had assumed it was all radar based post 1950, especially with the advent of the Nike missle batteries.

I've been hearing about it all week on my local NPR station- they are also using each of the spots to plug have a plan and be prepared.

I'm not worried about anyone flipping out because of the date. I'm more worried about people just flipping out because they can- think War of the Worlds, 1938.

Although, doing a 100 second EAS test on Oct 31, 2038, say at about 8.12pm....

Oct 31, 2038?

HJ

100th anniversary of the Mercury Theater broadcast of War of the Worlds. It was on at 8, and about 12 minutes in most people cruised down the dial from a ventriloquist on the Charlie McCarthy show to a news man taking fire from the martian walkers' heat ray and then- silence.

Bricks dropped.

Ah. Got it.

HJ

Dang if I don't learn something new every time I log in to ETS!

So when in the entire history of the United States would a nationwide alert have been appropriate?

I can see a regional alert, but nationwide? Gimme a break. Even 9/11 was a regional disaster - in the sense that only a regional alert would have been needed. This sounds like a big waste of money. I'm glad I don't watch TV.

The closest we ever came to needing this would have been when the Soviets parked 10,000 warheads off our coasts but that threat went away 20 years ago. Am I missing something?

I agree that we haven't had a reason for a nationwide EAS alert before, and the probability that we'll ever need one is (thankfully) quite low.

However, I come at this from a different perspective: Whatever your emergency plans are, it's very difficult to be sure they work if they aren't ever tested. In the world of IT, you need to not just backup your data but test restoring it from the backup media. You need to not just have business continuity and disaster recovery plans, you need to run test scenarios to see what needs changing. You can have the most perfect plan, processes, procedures and equipment possible, but if you don't practice the training degrades. I have customers that do full-scale backup datacenter tests quarterly.

Should we be having a nationwide EAS test every week? I would say not even every year. But testing it once every few years makes sense to me.

Well, in hindsight, you can make a case for 9/11 being a "regional disaster." At the moment, however, that was far from clear.

I was up early that day, watching CNN. It was a slow newsday - the lead story was about Michael Jordan, until they broke in with a developing story about a plane crash in NYC. With a ringside seat as events unfolded, I kept thinking, "what might happen out here on the west coast? How far will all this reach?"

You may recall that very quickly all planes within the US were grounded immediately. That affected even charter flights to the Channel Islands so we had park personnel staying longer than anticipated. To me, that would qualify as an event that was national in scope.

My wife had not been watching TV, but when she arose later to take our daughter to school, I informed her, and said, "Be careful out there. Bad things are happening."