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 will be a nationwide test of the system on broadcast stations and mobile devices this Wednesday (October 3rd, 2018).
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or “FEMA”, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, postponed the nationwide test of the EAS and Wireless Emergency Alerts, which was to have been in September. They tell us this was due to response efforts to Hurricane Florence at that time.
The wireless device portion of the test is to start at 1:18 p.m. our time, and the EAS portion follows on cable, satellite, and broadcast stations at 1:20 p.m. this Wednesday. The test will assess the operational readiness of the infrastructure for distribution of a national message and determine whether improvements are needed, according to officials.
So expect your wireless devices, weather radios, and specially-equipped devices to sound an alert in the 1 p.m. hour. Listen to make sure it’s not a real alert, but it will probably only be a test. We at KIWA plan to run the test as it comes across as well.
In July, the Federal Communications Commission or “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.
