Today was supposed to be the first ever national activation of the new Emergency Alerting System. There's fail, Fail and FAIL. and I think this one warrants the extra special category of....

F A I L

Some interesting points:
- Some DirectTV customers reported hearing Lady Gaga's “Paparazzi” play during the test.
- FEMA official concedes "glitch"; says that it appears (maybe) to be related to how satellite and cable providers prepped their equipment.

Not only did the message not reach the (shrinking) broadcast audience, there was absolutely no effort to reach people via mobile channel (SMS) or internet.

Yeah, but isn't that why they test?

At this point, this "test" should have been largely isolated gaps - certainly not the widespread failure. This is not a wholly new system by any means - the attempt to synch an alert nationwide has been in the works for a LONG TIME and the fact that the fail was this large is just embarrassing.

One thing I noticed here, was that it didn't run for nearly as long as the typical weekly/monthly tests. I barely had enough time to read what it said before it kicked back over to normal TV.

Don't be naive - the fact that they didn't test SMS or the Internet constitutes a success in my book: the day that a government agency can reach in and interrupt all Internet transmissions to transmit *any* message is a day that I turn off my laptop and PCs. Not to mention, if the capability exists for a national EAS over the Internet, the same capability is feasible for attackers with a far more dangerous agenda.

Second, this is what tests are for - afaik this is the first national EAS test. There are bound to be glitches. For my part my Comcast off-brand cable station was interrupted at 11am PDT, for 30 seconds, just as anticipated. Identify the glitches, rerun the test. Rinse, repeat. What exactly is your point in branding this test a FAIL?

I am less convinced of the necessity of a national EAS. A message with a national magnitude probably means we can all bend over and kiss our tuckuses goodbye.

I think I view this test similarly to Lono (I absentmindedly missed the test, BTW, and didn't have a radio or TV on. Doh!) As the first national test, half the purpose is finding the bugs in the system. Good thing that asteroid was going to miss us yesterday!

My local NOAA station was apparently down. Either that, or my weather radio broke.

I did hear the alert on the regular radio (NPR). I also got emails from the emergency system from work. So it wasn't all bad.

No texts, though I believe I should have gotten some.

DB

NOAA radio stations where not carrying this EAS test in any case. There are plans to include them in the future, and the data from this test was intended to help bring that about.

"NOAA Weather Radio will not transmit the EAS Test. There is currently no mechanism to transport this type of message to NWR transmitters. Additionally, the Test will use the EAN code where the audio message exceeds the two minute audio time limit allowed by Specific Area Messaging Encoding (SAME) and the EAS."

FEMA EAS Announcement

Hi,

I don't think of this as failure. It demonstrated areas for improvement, which was the purpose.
Of greater concern to me is the apathy demonstrated by our fellow citizens. Honestly, I forgot about it a minute after I saw it on CNN yesterday morning. Didn't think of it again until I saw the posts here.
There is a need to communicate with the citizenry without impinging on our privacy & freedoms. I think that banners on sites like Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, etc. will reach more people than radio and some TV.
The government can have the cell servers contact each subscriber also.
There are ways to reach out in the 21st Century.
Just my thoughts...

Finn

The epic FAIL ... was a success :-)
At least they now realize that their top-down system is not working. Time to fix the real problems - we might really need to do this someday.

Pete2

National Emergency Alert System test planned for Nov. 9 didn't work as it should be. The check have had impact on countrywide television and radio stations. Wireless-aware alert programs are due to be rolled out in the next year. Well, that is why it is called a test. They will be planning to test it again until they get it right. That would be the idea, why they're testing it. Let's just be positive about this.

Many years ago, I did some developmental and operational testing of systems for Uncle Sam. First lesson we learned: establish performance criteria before the tests, not after. This helps with things like knowing why you are testing and how you performed after the tests.

Seems like this was not done for this national test, at least not publicly.

This probably sent more people running for cover than anything else they could have done...

My wife said it worked on our cable TV.

I personally think it is a waste of time and money.

There is no nationwide emergency that would benefit from such a system. If something that big happened, it would be hard not to find out about it.

Test was intented to verify if system worked; so, system failed, test worked anyway! ;-)
Think iof what would it happened if it was real rather than a test...

I have 2 question:
- will test results be made public?
- how many tests will be carried on next? A single test does not proof anything, and the more complex a system is, the higher number of test it requires; this test involves hundreds of millions of people and thousands of broadcaster...

Probably at least a couple of tests per year would be required for next, say, 10 years (assuming system will not be actually needed in the meantime...), but wouldn't people get used to it up to ignoring alert messages in the future...?

I'm sure they already have the ability to tap into your transmissions right now. What they failed in was passing an important message to you.

Japan didn't seem to have any trouble doing it to warn their people of an impending disaster. They gave them almost a whole minute to execute a planned response.

OUR government apparently isn't capable of giving us any warning. The first we shall know about it is when we're knocked on our a$$es!

I'm with Marty on this: FAIL!

Sue

Update:

I still rate this a Fail.