Failures Mark First National Test of Emergency Alert System 451
An anonymous reader writes "The first full-scale test of the National Emergency Alert System failed on Tuesday at 2 PM. Some radio and television networks did not air any alert, while the performance of others was inconsistent. 'Some DirectTV customers reported hearing Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" play during the test. Some Comcast subscribers saw their cable boxes turn to QVC before the alert, while Time Warner Cable customers in New York did not see any alert at all.'" If you were tuned to any American broadcaster at the time, did the alert system reach you?
Um... That is why it is called a "TEST" (Score:5, Insightful)
Doing it wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
National Journal's Marc Ambinder tweets: FEMA official concedes "glitch"; says that it appears (maybe) to be related to how satellite and cable providers prepped their equipment.
If your emergency broadcast system requires all cable and satellite providers to "prep" their equipment beforehand, you are doing something fundamentally wrong.
Complete waste (Score:5, Insightful)
I do have a cell phone on me all the time, and received no alerts on it.
I can tell you from experience however, that if it were an Amber Alert, I would have been aware of it immediately.
CONCLUSION: EAS is another complete misguided federal program.
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Each failure is an opportunity to learn and improve.
The real failure would be to not identify failures and not improve - then we'd have to be blasted about it by the sensationalist media, trumpeting how inept government is.
Damn straight! (Score:4, Insightful)
We should leave emergency notifications to the free markets! You want to know about disasters and what to do? Well, just subscribe to a disaster notification service. I'm AT&T or your cable companies will provide that service as part of a package of some sort. And we all know what superior service cable companies have over pathetic government!
Re:Failures, what a surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because 9/11 in all actuality was only a threat to a ludicrously, miniscule number of people compared to say... the rest of the country. I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of the country wasn't even slightly, remotely affected by it (ignoring the after side-effects of the shredding of the constitution and soforth).
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
ICBM attack
Seriously: If that happens, you're better off not knowing anyway. At least you won't spend your last few minutes of life scared out of your mind because you know you're going to die in a nuclear firestorm.
Your conclusion does not fit the facts. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Millions heard it.
2. Using all communication methods to broadcast a message of national urgency is hardly misguided. It's a common sense idea.
3. They'll add other methods soon enough.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fool! Without that alert, how on earth are you going to talk the closest girl to you into impending disaster sex?
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those words never go together. I am shocked.
Yeah... except it was the private broadcast companies that failed to properly show the alert not the goverment.
Re:Um... That is why it is called a "TEST" (Score:3, Insightful)
Under what circumstance would everyone in the nation need to be informed instantly? To warn you the nuclear weapon that's been pointed in your general direction since birth actually launched? That the hurricane we've been watching for over a week is finally going to make landfall? That the [insert party not running the warning button] is holding up some piece of legislation? That someone flew planes into buildings in downtown Manhattan?
Pretty sure we can live without the national wide warning system for another decade or 100. News of 9/11 spread very rapidly just from word of mouth, flaky internet access and even before everyone older than age 1 had a cellphone. Not to mention the local emergency responders reacted without it as well as the local citizens who were away from ground zero didn't have a panic trample everything in their path reaction.
Re:Spotty (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad these notifications don't reach those of us who don't rely on antiquated broadcast media.
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
As I say at work, this is why we test. Debugging finds bugs. That's kinda what it's for.
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what the word "Test" means, right?
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
^ This
Testing for something and finding that the test didn't pass is NOT a failure of a system. It's exactly what it said - a test. Now they know where the faults are they can work on fixing them.
Re:Um... That is why it is called a "TEST" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um... That is why it is called a "TEST" (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you understood what he was saying.
I sure did. A national alert system is not only useful for national alerts, but also local ones.
Like the other AC, I can't see any actual use for the system.
In the event of a disaster, you're more likely to have a working radio than a working cell phone.
Good Luck I Am NOT North American! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Government failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Err, Human failure....
I'm never sure why people like to pile on the government. Like any social organization, and Soylent Green, it's made of people. Just like Citibank screwed itself, Enron self destructed, Goldman Sachs enabled Greece to self-destruct, all governments and companies are made of people.
One additional thing to add, government employees rarely get high pay (remember that those $600 toilet seats were paid to private contractors). So, you're blaming fallible humans, a group made more likely to be fallible by the fact you don't want to pay (taxes) to hire the best.
Re:Government failure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Testing for something and finding that the test didn't pass is NOT a failure of a system. It's exactly what it said - a test.
And when the test fails, it is, indeed, a failure of the system as a whole. What was the intended outcome? (A nationwide alert.) Was the outcome achieved? (No.) This is almost a "by definition" kind of concept, you know. You test something and it doesn't work, that means IT FAILED.
The only way this test didn't fail "because it was a test" is if you think the important operational criterion is the ability to test, not the ability to notify people in an emergency. Or maybe you are confused by the use of the word "test", and are thinking of how when a student takes a test and doesn't pass it doesn't mean the system failed. Well, in this case, the test wasn't applied to students, it was a direct test of the system as a whole and yes, it did, really, overall, fail miserably.
Now they know where the faults are they can work on fixing them.
Now they know where some of the faults are and can work on fixing them. If you don't get a successful test of the entire system, then the parts that didn't get tested may still have faults that weren't detected. If a major switch somewhere failed, you can spend a lot of money fixing it and then feel safe, without realizing that every leaf node that it fed would have failed had it gotten the alert.
There is no question that we are going to need another test, after a significant period of time. And then another. And another. Soon we will be getting tired of the testing and it will take place at 3AM like the regular regional tests already do.
The important, unasked question is just why do we still need a national alert system? Is there someone out there ready to plop 100 nukes into all our major cities all at once? Unlikely. Would notifying all those people all at once really have much positive effect? We already have localized alerting systems that are tested on a regular basis, and we have better means of distribution -- NOAA weather radio. Do we need to fix this system, or should we just pull the national plug and let the regional ops continue?
As for the original article mentioning that Comcast switched to QVC before the test message, yeah, so what? That's how the system is designed. It is much easier for a cable system to send the "everyone change to channel X" command downstream instead of trying to insert the alert message into every digital stream. Or insert the alert into one digital stream and then copy it to all the other streams. Of course, the ANALOG channels need to have individual alerts for those people who use analog TVs, but all the digital subs who have digital cable boxes can get by with one channel for the alert.
I was listening to local AM radio -- not a peep. The news story leading the 11AM (2PM EST) report? "If you can hear me now, the test failed."
Re:Government failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, you do know the difference between DEVELOPMENT testing and ACCEPTANCE testing, right?
The national alert system is a product in development. This was a test to determine what is working and what is not working. You can simulate and test individual pieces all you want, but until you get the opportunity to test the entire system, you have no idea what links in the chain are broken.
This country is full of fucking idiots that have no clue how engineering is performed. Just keep your misinformation to yourself and stop trying to make those around you dumber.
Re:Damn straight! (Score:4, Insightful)
We should leave emergency notifications to the free markets! You want to know about disasters and what to do? Well, just subscribe to a disaster notification service. I'm AT&T or your cable companies will provide that service as part of a package of some sort. And we all know what superior service cable companies have over pathetic government!
We already do! There is no law preventing any organization from creating such a service. Our options are "free market and government" or "free market only"...Sorry for posting a serious reply to satirical comment, but one of my pet peeves is when the government steps in to solve a problem and conservatives reply "the free market would have done it faster/better/cheaper".
No, they wouldn't have, and they didn't. That's why the problem existed.
Even better (Score:5, Insightful)