#false alarms

[queenmabcreates]

False Alarms

[ramonaflow]

Noah Reid performing False Alarms at The Danforth Music Hall via Baselinemusic ig (x)

[johnschneiderblog]

False alarms

It’s happened to me three times now but let me say, in my defense, that the first two incidents were on my boat, on an unruly Lake Huron.

Both were a matter of bad timing; waves rocked the boat just as I picked up my phone. I squeezed the wrong buttons and suddenly I was calling 911.

That’s because my phone includes a feature called  ‘Emergency SOS”. It’s a quick and easy way to send out a distress signal. Too easy, I guess, for us klutzes.

In both cases I tried to cancel the call, but immediately got return calls from 911 dispatchers, who clearly have better things to do than deal with false alarms. 

The third time this happened - just a couple of days ago - I was trying to take a screen shot and pushed the wrong combination of buttons. Soon I was apologizing, once again, to a 911 operator.

The only decent thing to do was to disable this feature - at least until I could figure out what I was doing wrong. That part was easy - I just opened “Settings,” found “Emergency SOS” and toggled it off.

I wonder how many of these bogus calls dispatchers are getting.

[wyntirose]

The reference vs the build part 2 - false alarms

[piercedthrutheheart]

False Alarms ft. Jon Bellion | Lawrence

[thatscarletflycatcher]

FALSE ALARMS

FROM JOSH GROBAN'S ALL THAT ECHOES.

[autistic-infp]

Stupid stupid stupid stupid false fire alarm TWICE tonight

Fucking neurotypicals have no idea how PAINFUL that shit is

It was like someone was trying to burst every one of my neurons from sheer kinetic force

It sounds like all the screams I've ever heard at once amplified and combined and put in a high definition speaker inside my ear drums

Lots of things annoy me and make me uncomfortable, but fire alarms LEGITIMATELY hurt

[theearlywarning]

Lethal Flaws - The EBS False Alarm of 1971

‘We interrupt this program. This is a national emergency. Important instructions will follow in 30 seconds...’

—

Today is February 20th 2020. The current time is 9:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Many people across the US at this time are likely enjoying breakfast, driving to work, dropping their kids off at school, or perhaps relishing in a day off.

49 years ago on this day, at 9:33 a.m. EST, the Emergency Broadcast System was activated in error nationwide, sending over 5,000 radio and 800 TV stations on alert for a national-level emergency and bringing America to a standstill for nearly an hour. A system so vital to the safety and security of US inhabitants suddenly had several glaring flaws that left citizens vulnerable and civil defense officials scrambling. It was this false activation that paved the way for the development of our modern Emergency Alert System, which sought to solve for the imperfections of the old system and give Americans a speedier, more accurate and more usable means of early warning in case of emergency.

"I can't imagine how the hell I did it."

—W.S. Eberhardt, teletype operator

The incident occurred on a Saturday morning at the National Emergency Warning Center at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), stationed in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The NEWC was a division responsible for two crucial EBS functions: running regular weekly tests of the EBS through to radio and TV stations, and sending out actual warnings for national emergencies.

That morning, civilian teletype operator Wayland S. Eberhardt was responsible for conducting that week’s required test by feeding a tape through the teletype, which connected directly to the Associated Press and United Press news wires, sending it to stations across the US. There were three tapes near the teletype: the test message, EAN message #1 White Card, and EAN message #2 Red Card. With each of the three tapes comes a set of monthly codewords used by stations to authenticate the message. For Eberhardt, a veteran operator of 15 years, feeding the weekly test through the wire was as mundane and routine as doing one’s laundry.

But everybody makes simple mistakes. And this morning, Eberhardt didn’t feed the test message through as he intended. He sent the EAN White Card and its authenticator words through the machine by mistake.

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack trying to open that damned envelope. I haven’t felt that way since John Kennedy was killed.”

—David Skinner, WEVA radio

The message came through the wire to teletypes nationwide. An interconnected typewriter-like device using bells, paper tape reels and telegraph capabilities, the teletype’s daily series of news stories and reports was interrupted by a whopping ten bells —a signal of an extremely urgent message— which were immediately followed by a text announcement that read the following:

MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: HATEFULNESS/HATEFULNESS

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ACTION NOTIFICATION (EAN) DIRECTED BY THE PRESIDENT. NORMAL BROADCASTING WILL CEASE IMMEDIATELY. ALL STATIONS WILL BROADCAST EAN MESSAGE ONE PRECEDED BY THE ATTENTION SIGNAL, PER FCC RULES. ONLY STATIONS HOLDING NDEA MAY STAY ON AIR IN ACCORD WITH THEIR STATE EBS PLAN.

BROADCAST EAN MESSAGE ONE.

MESSAGE AUTHENTICATOR: HATEFULNESS/HATEFULNESS

20 FEB

Widespread confusion followed over the air as Americans listened. An estimated 20% of broadcasting outlets that day followed proper national emergency activation procedures and prepared listeners to hear an urgent message from then sitting President Nixon. Others followed procedures but ceased the interruption before the all-clear message was received. Still others ignored the activation entirely, as they had noted that the alert was transmitted at the exact time a scheduled test was supposed to come through. This chaos only spread to the ones on the other end of radios and screens. Listeners around the country called stations in a panic, trying to figure out what national emergency was going on.

Senior operators at NORAD quickly identified the error and attempted to correct it. They sent several cancellation messages through the wire, but without proper cancellation authenticator codes needed to officially end the EAN. Finally, at 10:13am EST, 40 minutes after the erroneous activation, Cheyenne Mountain sent out a cancellation message with the proper authenticator word, IMPISH, to all broadcasting stations, officially ending the alert.

A teletype machine wired to the United Press International newsfeed. These machines were the live news sources of radio and TV stations across the country.

While Nixon himself declined to comment on the incident, the Pentagon quickly laid blame on the Office of Civil Defense, which oversaw the National Emergency Warning Center. The Office of CD itself concluded that the false alarm was nothing more than a mishap. Corrective measures were taken, but Eberhardt himself was not fired for the mistake that left him “seriously shook up”. After the incident, the two tapes for EAN scripts were sealed in envelopes and placed in cabinets away from the transmitter, leaving only the test tape by the unit. This was done to ensure that a simple act of muscle memory wouldn’t allow for another false alert.

But this still left several painfully apparent flaws in the EBS out in the open, leaving officials with a lot of improvements to make. Years later, the EBS was officially decommissioned in 1997 to make way for the Emergency Alert System, which remains in use today as part of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS. 

The false alarm of 1971 remains obscure in the history books as only a blip on the Cold War overview. This event, however, was pivotal in modernizing public warning systems across the United States, and The Early Warning recognizes its importance as such.

Below this post is a video containing two recordings of the false alarm as it happened, one heard on WOWO AM, the other on WCCO AM. I invite you to give these recordings a listen. It’s hard to imagine the nerves of the announcers as they read the White Card and the fear of the ones who were listening, but it is sobering to know that all of this happened only 49 years ago. 

February 20, 1971: America panics as emergency warning is broadcast in error

The Nuclear Attack That Wasn't: February 20, 1971

Code Word “Hatefulness”: The Great EBS Scare of 1971