Rethinking the Plan for Emergency Alerts

For Americans living during the Cold War, the interruption served as a periodic, chilling reminder that at any moment they might have to dive under a desk. For later generations, it merely sent them lunging for the volume knob.

“This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System,” intoned the voice from the radio or television, followed by that god-awful squeal or buzz. “If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been notified where to go in your area.”

Created in 1963, the Emergency Broadcast System--now called the Emergency Alert System--was designed to allow the president to break into all programming during a crisis and address the nation with only a few minutes’ notice. But the White House has never used the system, although local governments use it hundreds of times annually to warn of dangerous weather or other hazards.

During the Cold War that spawned the system’s creation, the United States never saw an actual emergency. Yet when the country did see one on Sept. 11, the EAS didn’t squawk to life. It simply wasn’t needed, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell said this week.

Through radio, TV, the Web and other news outlets, the public got a torrent of information without the EAS being activated, he said. And when President Bush did speak that afternoon and evening, the networks carried it live.

“The explosion of 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week media networks, the unbelievable ubiquity of coverage, really in some ways has proven to supplant those original conceptions of a senior leader’s need to talk to the people,” Powell said. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, “I don’t think anybody had any shortage of hearing from [New York City] Mayor Giuliani or the president.”

“This sort of ubiquitous media environment and culture that we live in really provides pretty valuable vehicles for our leadership to communicate with the citizenry, short of the Emergency Alert System,” Powell said Wednesday on “Public Interest,” a National Public Radio talk show that originates at WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C.

“One of the things we’re going to do at the commission, is do a little bit of a modest review of the EAS system,” Powell continued. “It will always be ready and available for our national leaders and our state leaders to make use of if necessary. But I do think that we need to examine the ways that consumers have really come to rely on that kind of service. At the state and local level it is much more commonly used for weather alerts, hurricane emergencies, earthquake emergencies. Whether it’s a critical vehicle for communication from senior leaders to the citizenry about general states of affairs may still be true but I think probably needs to be reexamined.”

Clarifying Powell’s remarks afterward, David Fiske, director of the FCC’s office of media relations, said the chairman wasn’t calling the EAS an anachronism, the aural equivalent of a missile defense treaty. Nor is the government handing over one of its responsibilities to the private sector.

“There wasn’t anything to alert people to. The event had happened,” said Don Jacks, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for activating the system nationally in a crisis. He said it “was designed to alert the American public to a missile attack, something like that.”

The system might have been used, for example, if attacks on skyscrapers had occurred in cities other than New York, he said. The alerts could have told people to evacuate to lower floors of high-rises. “The EAS clearly has a function,” Fiske said, and is ready to be used--even as Attorney General John Ashcroft and others warned this week that another attack might be imminent.

But in the weeks following Sept. 11, FEMA officials thought that EAS testing might create more panic than reassurance. They asked the FCC to suspend weekly tests of the system, concerned that listeners would hear the alert tones and fear another attack was occurring. The voluntary moratorium on testing ended Oct. 2.

The last time the system was used in Los Angeles was to warn of severe weather last winter, said Richard Rudman, director of engineering at KFWB-AM (980) and chairman of the EAS National Advisory Committee. For local emergencies, the National Weather Service and Los Angeles County emergency management officials decide when to announce an alert, and Rudman said the cooperation between L.A.-area broadcasters and emergency officials is among the best in the country.

On Sept. 11, local officials in New York and Washington, D.C., chose not to use the EAS. Again, FCC and FEMA officials said news outlets did their part, giving information about road closures and police activity. The uncertainty surrounding that day may have also played a role in the decision.

“When you tell somebody ‘head for the hills,’ you have to tell them which hill to head for, how fast and what to do when they get there,” Rudman said. “I would not want to second-guess their decision.” But FEMA and FCC officials need to make sure local officials nationwide know the emergency system is at their disposal, he added.

Rudman’s committee advises the federal agencies on how best to use the system and coordinate with state, county and city emergency leaders. Every radio and television station in the country is required to have the equipment to receive Emergency Alert messages, as are cable companies with more than 10,000 subscribers. They can be automated to override programming, even when no one is at the station, and can broadcast the message in the language that the station usually uses.

The EAS replaced the Emergency Broadcast System in 1994, with the main difference being the way the system alerts equipment at radio and TV stations that a message is coming. In addition, required weekly on-air tests were cut to once a month. Even so, they had gotten to the point of being taken for granted or ignored by Americans, Rudman said: “The tests kind of go into the wallpaper.”

So, far from mothballing the EAS as a Cold War relic, Rudman and his committee want to drag it into the information age. They want to one day have the alerts available on cell phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, even watches. They want the alerts to activate those gadgets, even if they’re turned off. And they want provisions for the deaf and other disabled, so anyone can know immediately if danger is imminent.

“Information is a resource the way sandbags and shovels are,” Rudman said. “We might, in effect, create an emergency lane on the information superhighway.”