Relax. That high-pitched whine blaring out of your television and radio at noon on Wednesday may be enough to make your ears bleed, but it does not signify imminent zombie invasion.
Like the man says, “This is only a test.”
What is different about tomorrow’s annoying beep is that for the first time, a test of the nation’s Emergency Alert System is occurring simultaneously across the country.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Communications Commission will conduct the test Wednesday, briefly interrupting Judge Judy, sports radio’s Tebow talk and everything else.
“It will be lot like what we see every month,” said Micki Trost of Colorado’s Division of Emergency Management.
All broadcast stations and cable systems are regularly required to participate in the nationwide Emergency Alert System, which means each station has to run a test once a month, Trost said.
What will be different this time is that because the test is being conducted nationally, it’s not clear whether the reassuring words “this is only a test” will crawl across television screens as they do when the test enacted locally.
That has officials on edge, worried that those who are hearing or cognitively impaired or don’t understand English might panic.
“We want to get the word out because we’re trying to avoid having the 9-1-1 dispatchers inundated with calls wondering what the emergencies are,” Trost said.
That explains the television ads over the last week or so, reassuring viewers that Wednesday’s test is just that.
As for the reasons behind this nationwide exercise, FEMA Administrator W. Craig Fugate explained in a recent memo to emergency managers that: “The various disasters our country has faced this year underscore the need for effective and well-tested emergency alert and warning systems.”
However, Susan Buchanan of the National Weather Service said the nationwide test had been planned long before last spring’s devastating tornadoes from Joplin, Mo., to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or the snowstorm in the northeast last month that left some in Connecticut still waiting for the power to come back on.
Local weather alerts — like those warning Colorado residents of tornadoes — constitute the most frequent non-test use of the emergency alert system.
The current system is the grandchild of a system born in 1951 – on radio – during the height of Cold War fears. In 1963, the system spread to TV, but it has never been used to alert us to a nationwide threat.
Preparations for today’s test have uncovered system shortcomings, including no provision for closed captioning or language translation, according to Fugate’s memo.
The involved agencies are working on improvements, the administrator wrote.
In fact, the FCC and FEMA plan to roll-out soon a text-message system that will alert the public to approaching threats through their smart phones, Buchanan said.
Stay tuned.
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com
