Sheldon, Iowa — The Emergency Alert System or “EAS” is designed to enable the President of the United States to speak to the United States within 10 minutes. In addition to this requirement, the EAS is also designed to alert the public of local weather emergencies such as tornadoes and flash floods (and in some cases severe thunderstorms depending on the severity of the storm). There was supposed to be a nationwide test of the system on broadcast stations and mobile devices on Thursday of this week (September 20, 2018). But that test has been postponed.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or “FEMA”, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, has postponed the nationwide test of the EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts until October 3rd. They tell us this is due to ongoing response efforts to Hurricane Florence.
The wireless device portion of the test is to start at 1:18 p.m. our time, and the EAS portion follows at 1:20 p.m. on October 3rd. The test will assess the operational readiness of the infrastructure for distribution of a national message and determine whether improvements are needed.
They tell us that FEMA and the nation’s emergency management community remain committed at this time to the life-saving activities occurring through parts of North Carolina and South Carolina.
In July, the FCC made some changes. Now stations can use “live code testing.” That means they can test the system using an actual warning instead of a test code — but they can only do this after lots of publicity that the real codes are only being used as part of a test. The other change is that stations can use simulated EAS tones as part of an announcement by FEMA or other government agencies as an example of what to listen for. But the simulated tones have to be supplied by FEMA and they’ve been designed not to trigger automatic receivers and other equipment.
For further information on the test, you can visit https://www.fema.gov/emergency-alert-test.
