It appears Wednesday’s regional EAS test was a mixed bag.
Though the test message was successfully distributed throughout 19 states and territories, however emergency management officials in six additional states decided to drop the test because of severe weather and that word didn’t reach a lot of stations.
We had reported Florida was dropped from the list yesterday because that state’s emergency management officials didn’t want the test interfering with a real weather emergency. That decision was also made today in Virginia and North Carolina. The National Weather Service recommended the test also not air in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi because of on-going recovery activities in those states following overnight severe weather. That’s according to a note posted by Al Kenyon, national test technical lead for FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, on the SBE EAS list serv.
Some folks didn’t get the word the alerts with the National Periodic Test event code wouldn’t go to their areas.
Alabama Broadcasters Association Sharon Tinsley stated she would have like to have known about the changes since “We’ve been working diligently with our stations for weeks to make sure they had the NPT code set.”
An engineer for several stations in Alabama agreed, adding “Please pass on to whomever decided to waive it off and keep it a secret that we greatly appreciate the panic and wasted time,” in trying to find out what happened.
RBR+TVBR observation: There’s so many moving parts and agencies involved in EAS it’s hard to get the word out in a timely way when something changes late in the process. That affects station personnel who had to prep for the tests, and then try to figure out what went wrong in those affected states. The good news is the messages were delivered in 19 states/territories.
