Why do we bother with EAS if we don't use it?

[bilco]

That false national test was 20 Feb 1971 when a Norad civilian employee called in sick and his fill in, put the wrong pundhed tape on the teletype. Most stations ignored it, there was no wide spread panic and the correction came down minutes later. The civilian employee was celebrating with me the night before at a JayCee function and had a hang over! One false alarm in the national system in the last 40 years is not a bad record. There have been several errors but none that resulted in serious problems, just some inconvenience, like the time I sent a tsunami warning over the Las Vegas system during a test after TFT upgraded their Proms to add the Amber Alert. The lives saved in tornado alley, the children recovered and the trouble prevented more than make it worth it. Sure there have been problems but all in all it's not a bad record for hundreds of thousands of sucessful tests and successful alerts.

 

[gr8oldies]

There's an aircheck on reelradio.com and historyofWOWO.com of that morning. Bob Sievers was on the air asking people not to call to ask what was the matter as they were trying to find out themselves. 20 min of great listening!

 

[RealityCheckr]

I am curious as this was before my time. Having lived through the cold war I can believe it was have caused a lot of stress to the public.

Was this incident properly authenticated by the secret decoder ring (uh, sheet) in the do not open envelope? If not, why did it spread.

Or was the secret words added after this error came about?

 

[Tom Wells]

I am curious as this was before my time. Having lived through the cold war I can believe it was have caused a lot of stress to the public.

Was this incident properly authenticated by the secret decoder ring (uh, sheet) in the do not open envelope? If not, why did it spread.

Or was the secret words added after this error came about?

This error initiated at a point after which the authentication would have been "assured".
A paper tape with 5-bit Baudot code ( as opposed to 7-bit ascii) in holes punched into it, was fed into a Teletype 45-baud MASTER transmitter,
feeding the system. The guy responsible for running the tape grabbed the wrong tape that day.

I've always wondered if the REAL message didn't fact have a whole LOT of <ctrl > Gs ( BELL ) more than the test messages did?
It would have been typical as ctrl G was used to operators for a long time that urgent news was on the machine.
If so, you'd think the guy would have heard a "wrong" bell alert, and could have yanked it before the whole thing ran.
Maybe he did and there was no way to dump the thing.

 

[bilco]

for more on the false national test see http://ebstest.stlmedia.net/

 

[TomT]

Back then, we all had those massive clunking teletype machines for the news wire services; the national alert generated ten bells (as opposed to four of five bells which signified something like a special news bulletin).

As I recall, our college station was not on the air that Saturday morning (spring break or something like that), but friends working at the local commercial station told me later that they immediately checked the CBS news feed, heard nothing out of the ordinary, and came the quick conclusion that this was some kind of screw up.

By that time, they finally sent the right cancellation & code word to match the one listed in the red envelope.