June 28, 2019 • 32 mins
What was the Emergency Broadcast System? What did it have to do with the Cold War? How is the Emergency Alert System different from the old EBS? Listen in as Chris and Jonathan explain the origin of the EBS and the EAS.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
all things tech. Today, it's time for another classic episode
(00:24):
of tech Stuff. This one originally aired on August one,
two thousand twelve, and it is titled tech Stuff Tests
the Emergency Broadcast System. Chris Pilette and I decided to
sit down and really learn about the history of the
emergency broadcast system. What does it really mean? And maybe
you've actually turned on the TV when one of those
(00:46):
tests were going on and wondered what the heck is happening.
This show should answer all those questions, So take it away,
Chris and younger me. So, we wanted to do an
episode about the emergence see broadcast system. This was actually
a request that was sent in by a couple of
different listeners, which is interesting because it doesn't really technically
(01:08):
exist anymore. Now we have a new system in the
United States called the Emergency Alert System. Also, I should
apologize to all of our listeners from places other than
the United States. This is a very United States centric podcast.
But it's interesting anyway, trust me. Well it's it's become
something that's, uh, that's important in most situations too. I
mean they're they're uh tragedies and big events that happen
(01:32):
in places all over the world, so that the question
is you've got a country, um, you know, it doesn't
have to necessarily be the United States. We have a country,
have millions of people living there, and something is happening,
there's an earthquake or a tsunami or uh, some other
kind of accident um or another country is invading or
something like that. You know, something big where you need
to tell people, Hey, look out, there's something you need
(01:53):
to evacuate, you need to get out of there. How
do you address so many people in a short time? Now,
for the United States, what inspired this was the need
to reach out to people during World War two, um,
and there wasn't a system and subsequently the Cold War.
Yeah yeah, well, I mean the the whole uh, the
end of the the Second World War and it of
(02:17):
course with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan
and um, you know, it was apparent because other countries
had that technology pretty much right away, and that that
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union began shortly after that, and then there was a
UM there was a big fear in the United States,
but about um, what would happen if the Soviet Union
(02:40):
launched a nuclear attack on the United States? How do
you warn people? And they said, well, you know, judging
by what we did in World War Two, that was
fairly effective. But we need a system, we need we
need to plan, we need to figure out how we
can do this effectively and let everybody know in a
short period of time because we're not going to have
long we need to have a short period of time,
(03:03):
a message in place. How can we reach out to people?
And that was basically the birth of UM what now
is the Emergency Alert System, but at that point was
known as connal rad yes uh in fact, which wasn't
by the way, kind of sort of an acronym for
a control of electromagnetic radiation which is kind of terrifying, right,
(03:25):
But that was established in ninety one by under the
administration of Harry S. Truman. Quick Quick Quick Trivia was
the S stand for nothing. That's right, Harry S. Truman
stood for nothing. Wait, no, that's not right. Nothing. He
just wanted it. He liked it sort of, you know,
like Michael J. So you don't say like the S
stands for nothing, like nothing isn't spelled with S. I
(03:48):
don't mean to confuse you. The S doesn't mean anything.
So control of electromagnetic radiation getting back on track. Prior
to ninety one, these alerts went out over radio station.
They would get like an emergency bulletin, and it was
pretty much up to the station whether or not they
read it. Um conal Red kind of established a specific
protocol that needed to be followed in the event of
(04:10):
an emergency, and originally the idea was that it would
alert citizens of the United States of an impending attack
from the Soviet Union. In those days, we're talking about
before intercontinental ballistic missiles, so these attacks would take the
form of bombers flying overhead, and so conal Red had
two main purposes. Really, one was to issue alerts to
(04:32):
citizens to try and get them to safety as soon
as possible in the case of the attack, and the
second was to minimize the ability of the Soviets to
target UH specific areas based on radio frequencies. So part
of the connal Red protocol was that radio stations would
shut down and they would only uh broadcast in a
(04:55):
certain amount of time and under certain frequencies. So under
the Comrade protocol you essentially had this. This is what
would happen if if someone were to issue alert. By
the way, no alert was ever issued. It was originally
called a key station system, and the idea was that
you had these dedicated telephone circuits that connected the Air
Defense control centers to certain key radio stations called basic
(05:20):
key stations. If there were an appending attack, the Air
Defense Control center would issue the alert to the key
radio stations, these basic key stations that would then issue
that same alert to relay key stations. These would be
smaller regional radio stations. Uh so they it was sort
of a hierarchy, right, It went from Air Defense Control
centers to a certain number of basic radio stations to
(05:44):
every other radio station. Once they received the alert, the
radio stations would then broadcast a predetermined message out to
the listeners. And the way it would work is that
the stations would turn off for five seconds, so they
had stopped transmitting for five seconds, come back on for
five seconds, go off for five more seconds, then come
on and transmit a tone for fifteen seconds. Now, this
(06:05):
was the the audible alert saying something is up. You
get the predetermined message. Uh, actually we're really What you
had to do was tuned to one of two frequencies.
There was a frequency kill hurts frequency and the forty
kill hurts frequency. Now, these two frequencies were the only
two that were authorized to broadcast during one of these emergencies.
(06:27):
And uh, on radios at the time, you would see
this little symbol over those those frequencies and it was
a triangle inside a circle, and that's the Civil Defense mark. Yeah,
you might remember the symbol sort of red, white and
blue if you've seen it around and uh it's still
not terribly uncommon to see it every once in a
(06:48):
while someplace. So yeah, but that was that was saying like,
these are the two frequencies. If you if your favorite
radio station isn't on, tune into this station because this
is where the information is going to come from. Uh.
It was not the best system for a couple of
different reasons. One was that it was prone to false
alarms if like an electrical storm could set off a
(07:11):
false alarm, because you're talking about electricity and radio frequencies.
There is a relationship there and we have talked about
that extensively on this podcast. So listen to our episodes
about radio to learn more about electromagnetism, radio waves, and
electricity because I can't go into it here. But the
the lightning strikes could cause false alarms, which is, you know,
a bad thing if if you've been told that this
(07:33):
alert system means that there's an impending attack from Soviet planes,
it might cause a little stress. Also, the switching mechanism,
because it would make transmitters switch on and off in
this this UH, the sequence could cause transmitters to fail
over time, just from powering up and powering down so
frequently within a certain amount of time. And then of
(07:55):
course UH this whole system, this idea of cutting off
radio contact so that you could minimize the ability for
Soviets to target in on specific regions. It became meaningless
once intercontinental ballistic missiles became a real thing, right because
now you're not talking about planes anymore. You're talking about
(08:17):
guided missiles and uh or at least targeted missiles. So
it became clear that connal red was starting to no
longer be very relevant. So they the government started to think, well,
what can we do that will provide a similar method
for us to message out emergency notices, but use a
(08:39):
different approach, and that was what sort of led into
the development of the Emergency Broadcast System e B S.
YEP in ne EBS made its debut um and uh
again it it never was used, of course, to uh,
to communicate the threat of war. Not on purpose. We'll
(09:00):
get but I'm assuming that you listened to the w
O w Um. We'll get to that. But yeah, I
mean it was a much more robust system. Um. And
it's during the Kennedy administration for those of you keeping track, yep,
yep and um. One of the nice things about it
is uh here again, well you could kind of tell
(09:24):
kind of judge the mood too. Um. If you had
heard something come over conald Rad, you probably immediately would
have thought war. But EBS was actually used for other
things too. I remember weather alerts coming in using the
exact same thing, and so you would hear and this
was used on multiple radio stations. You didn't necessarily have
(09:45):
to tune into one radio station to get your information.
It would be broadcast over TV and radio. Because you
no longer had to worry about that targeting issue. Then
meant that all the stations could be used instead of
having to tune into a specific one while everything else
is turned off. And hey, that's more effective anyway to
reach people. Um. But yeah, you would hear this this
(10:06):
tone which it's hard to explain it if you've never
heard it. You're splitting other than you're splitting and annoying
between it does get your attention. Apparently, it's the combined
the sign waves of eight hundred and fifty three hurts
and nine sixty hurts specifically chosen because it does grab
your attention because it's very jarring to hear it. It's
(10:28):
just you you can't ignore it. If you can hear
you can't ignore it. That's that's true. Um. And of course, uh,
those of us who are familiar with it other than
you know, being living somewhere where they're multiple weather uh
situations like tornadoes or tornadoes. Yeah, no kidding, Um, you
would probably have heard this through the the alerts which
(10:51):
Jonathan and I grew up with, which was testing. Yeah,
they would say they would come on and say, well,
this is a test of the emergency broadcast system and
the next sixty seconds, we will be testing out the
emergency broadcast system. It would there was actually a very
specific script that would fall and then there would be
after they would tell you there's a test coming. They
would play this tone, and then there'd be another message
(11:12):
that would appear at the end saying this was a
test the emergency broadcast system. If this had been a
real emergency, you would have received more information at this
point alerting you to blah blah blah, blah blah, we
now return you to your regularly scheduled programming type stuff.
And they were required to do this test once a week. Yeah, regular,
on a regular basis. I didn't think it was quite
that frequently. It was once a week unless you had
(11:32):
actually had to issue a real alert. If you had
to issue a real alert, could skip over some time.
But it was once a week at essentially a random
time between eight thirty in the morning and sunset at night, uh,
sometime during the week. So it wasn't that we'll get
into this too. There wasn't a time where every single
(11:53):
station had to do it at the same time. It
was unique to the various stations. And like you were saying, us,
you know these alerts went out not just for a
national emergency. In fact, they never went out on purpose
for a national emergency instead. Uh so so never it
was never used purposefully For that reason, even though that
was the genesis of this system, it was used more
(12:16):
than oh, I don't know, several thousand times to alert
for civil emergencies, sometimes an alert about to be on
the lookout for a suspect in a in a particularly
nasty crime that could be an alert, or for the
weather alerts like the ones that Chris and I grew
up with. I can remember that happening so many times. Well.
(12:39):
The uh the way the emergency broadcast system worked was
that the only message that no station could ignore or
was supposed to ignore, was a national one. Right, So,
if you are a radio station in the middle of
nowhere and the national alert goes out, you were supposed
to to broadcast it just like every other station in
(13:01):
the country, whereas if it were a local or regional
you may or may not have been able to ignore
that message and not broadcast it. The way it worked
was that, again like the Connell red system, where you
had the key stations, the basic key stations, and the
relay key stations. There was a similar setup for the
emergency broadcast system. You had these primary points of contact,
(13:26):
which would be major broadcast stations usually, but these primary
points of contact had to issue all broadcast all the
alerts they got. They had no choice because they were
a primary point of contact. But if you were further
down the chain, like you are a secondary point or
further down, then you could elect whether or not to
broadcast that alert, assuming it wasn't a national alert that
(13:48):
was the only one. Of course, everyone had to broadcast.
So um, you know there were that That explains why
you might be in an area where a weather service
alert is being broadcast, asked, and you saw it on
one channel, but you switched to another local channel, and
there's nothing that could be why. It may be that
that other channels not a primary point and therefore was
(14:10):
not required to broadcast it. Beebe. This is not a test.
This is actually us going into a commercial break. See
you on the flip side. Now, the the incident that
Jonathan mentioned, famous incident. Now I read an account of
(14:33):
this from a person who was working at a radio
station in St. Louis at the time it happened. Um,
at the time it happened, by the way, is February.
And what he had said was that every Saturday at
ten thirty three, the radio stations would receive a test
message from Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. And so basically it
(14:58):
would say and there was a code word that it
would include that would let you know that it was
was genuine. And so at ten thirty three, um, there
there was a teletype machine in the other room and
he heard it and and typically it would it would
dig a couple of times to let you know, hey,
there's something something on the wire, you know, a news
story on the wire. But this one rang ten times,
(15:21):
which he knew was a big deal. Um. And so
he ran into the other room and got a message
that said he needed to broadcast a warning that there
was an announcement coming from the national you know, from
the federal government and it was something bad and impending,
(15:41):
and be on the alert because it was time to
broadcast a message. But they really weren't told what that
message was. What it was. Well, see here's the thing. Hateful, hateful,
the you know, which was a code word, meaning that
the code that was actually a code word. The hateful
was a code word that meant there's a message is
coming up, there's an attack coming up, but more details
(16:02):
will follow. Go ahead and initiate the alert system. And
it was a mistake that was made by a teletype
operator who sent this authenticated code out to the system,
which meant it went to all those those primary points
of contact, and it didn't say it didn't say a
minute later, oops, my bad. No, no, it took a while,
and in fact, the first time they tried to resend it,
(16:24):
they sent the wrong code, so it didn't resend the message.
It was only forty minutes after the initial message was
sent out that the cancelation, the correct cancelation went out.
So what happened was actually very telling in a way
because some radio, radio and television stations, actually a lot
of them, didn't do anything at all, so they did
(16:46):
not broadcast this message, and that, in a way is
a problem because the whole purpose of the system is
to relay a national emergency to everybody. Now. Now, in
many of these cases, it may be that the people
in charge said, there's no information here, we have no
real I mean, it's a confirmed code, but there's no
confirmed information and we have nothing to share with people.
(17:09):
So Why would we go ahead and do this when
we don't have any information we could give them. Yeah,
they were standing by to broadcast whatever the major announcement
was about the attack. Right. Some of them hadn't even
signaled the alert, right, They just the programming just kept
on going. But other stations did. Some of them didn't
know what to do, so some of them weren't doing
(17:31):
it on purpose. Some of them weren't doing it because
they didn't know what they were supposed to do. And
a few actually broke into programming and said, we've received
an alert from the Emergency Broadcast System. We know that
there is a national emergency. We're a waiting for more information.
Please stand by. And what Chris was talking about earlier
was there are a couple of recordings on the internet
you can listen to that were taken from that day.
(17:55):
And one of them is from an radio station from
Fort Wayne, Indiana called w ow OH, and you can
listen to that and you can find it on the internet.
The actual it's snippets from that. It's it's been edited.
It's sorry, it's been edited down so that you get
uh sections, the important sections of of the broadcast. It's
(18:15):
about what six minutes or so long, keeping in mind
that that whole window was more like forty minutes. So
this is six minutes of footage footage from six minutes
of content from that forty minute window. Yeah. So basically
what it said was, you know, hey, there there's something
coming up. It's it's um. It's one of those things
that would be funny. If it weren't, if you don't
put yourself back at that time, I would have been terrifying.
(18:36):
It would have been terrifying because he's the person who
was on the air. Was a you could tell, was it, uh,
seasoned newsperson? Yeah, yeah, he Uh. He was very serious
and said, you know, there's there's been a message. We're
waiting word for what's going on. Uh. If you are
listening and you are one of our reporters, come here immediately.
We need you here right now. And and basically was talking, uh,
(18:59):
not only to the audience, but to the the other
reporters who might be listening. The message itself actually said,
UM message authenticator, hatefulness, hatefulness. This is an emergency action
notification directed by the President. Normal broadcasting will cease immediately.
All stations will broadcast e A N message one preceded
by the attention signal. Per FCC rules, only stations holding
(19:21):
nd N D E A may stay on the air
and according and accord with State E B S plan.
And uh that would have scared the pants off of me. Um.
And it took a while, as Jonathan said, uh, you know,
kill e A N message. It was sent in error
and it took a while for it to uh to
(19:42):
show up. But the person he the person who I was,
I was reading, I should have gotten the the U
R L if I can find it real quick for
you guys, I will um. The the person who was,
who has actually posted photos of scans of his copies
of these messages, was saying, excuse the burn marks. I
(20:02):
was smoking pretty heavily through this incidents. It was kind
of stressed out. If you listen to the recording from
the w O w oh incident, you actually hear the
the newscaster kind of chuckling once the once the order
was sent out about this was a mistake, and you know,
(20:22):
kind of kind of because you know, clearly it was
one of those stressful things and the chuckling is him
releasing that stress, and it is an interesting moment in
history to kind of pick up on that. Um So, yeah,
not that was the only time that a national alert
went out across the system. And again it wasn't a
real one, it was a mistake. UM. And then what
(20:44):
was supposed to happen is that, depending upon the nature
of the emergency UH, stations are supposed to read from
a predetermined script like it's it's They're not supposed to
just you know, kind of provide commentary on it. There's
a specific message that needs to be relayed and um.
So that was the general purpose of the Emergency Broadcast System,
(21:05):
but it was starting to show its age, UH, particularly
in the nineties, because you started to have other methods
of getting content on your television besides broadcast TV, and
the Emergency Broadcast System really affected radio and broadcast television.
So there needed to be an overhaul of the system,
(21:25):
and that's what happened in the late nineties, and in
ninety eight you had the Emergency Alert System take its place.
And now you might say, well, what's the difference. Well,
for one thing, it doesn't just include broadcast stations. It
also includes cable and participating satellite systems. So now you've
got other methods of broadcast or or you know, other
(21:47):
methods of getting content over your television included in this.
So that way, if a citizen is watching cable television
or something on satellite TV, they could still have access
to an emergency message because clearly, you know, you don't
want to leave everybody out. As as people have more
and more ways of watching stuff, it's harder to reach
(22:07):
them in a centralized way. Yeah, these these systems were
developed to run on AM and FM radio and the
local broadcast stations. So now we've gone from in the
United States, UM, let's say, on average, probably three or
four regular network broadcast stations, maybe a couple independence in
the larger you know, larger cities, something in the ultra
(22:29):
high frequency. Yeah, you know, maybe six or six to
ten stations in big big markets. Um. Then you go
to dozens or even hundreds of stations now with cable
and satellite UM, you know, plus uh, you know the
radio stations which have exploded in number, um, satellite radio
and all the other media that we listen to. Now.
(22:51):
So yeah, the system, there's a lot of people, know,
the system needed to to evolve with that development, and
of course even now we're still we're already seeing a
need for that too, find another way of reaching people,
because as people start to use the Internet to get content,
now there's yet another avenue for information to get to them.
(23:11):
But you know, this system was not designed with that
in mind, so there's already another need coming out. Chris
and I have a bit more to say about the
emergency broadcast system, but first let's take another quick break.
The way it works now, the National Weather Service actually
(23:34):
has specific codes that they can attached to notices so
that those digital codes will send the message just to
the relevant regions. So that way, if there if the
National Weather Service detects that there's going to be you know,
a massive hurricane hitting the panhandle of Florida, it can
send an alert to say, Texas and Florida and you know, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
(24:00):
all those areas that could potentially be affected by heavy rains, winds,
that sort of stuff, and the rest of the nation
is unaffected, or even the rest you know, the rest
of certain states, like the northern part of the state
might not be affected because they're far enough away from
the coast where at least it's not gonna be an
immediate effect, they might not get the message either. Uh.
(24:21):
And it's so that the right information gets to the
right people. And it makes sense, you know, you don't
want to send out a message to the entire nation
that for something it's just going to affect a relatively
small um area of the nation as a whole. United
States is big, so uh, yeah, it was. It's something
that that has evolved over time. The and the other
(24:44):
thing I was going to talk about was what happened
on November nine. Yeah. Um, there is one sort of
interesting footnote UM to the the e B S ERA
passing from to the e A S era. UM. E
B S was not activated during the September eleven, two
thousand and one attacks. Um, which is kind of interesting
(25:07):
that they chose not to do, uh to use the
alert at that time, particularly since the attacks affected multiple
targets in multiple cities. So it is would have affected
even more had not the flight in Pennsylvania gone down.
So just just sort of an interesting footnote there. Um.
(25:27):
But Yes, on November nine, uh, the e A S
made its debut. Yeah, and the system had been in place,
but what happened was because the system was fail the
E A S was actually what would have been used
in September eleven, right, So, so on November what happened
(25:48):
was it was tested nationally and this was the first
time any of these systems had ever been tested on
a national level, meaning that every participating station was going
to display the test at the same time, and that
time was going to be UM. It was two pm
Eastern for on November, which means that if you didn't
(26:12):
know about it ahead of time and you turned on
your television, you would see this alert and you think, oh,
this is irritating this that one of those stupid tests.
Change the channel and that alert is still going and
it's going on this ocean. Oh, this is something. And
so there were a lot of messages that were sent
out before two pm November to let people know, Hey,
(26:32):
this is gonna happen. Don't worry, the zombies aren't here yet,
right or whatever other national emergency you might be able
to conjure up in your mind. I just cannot imagine
a national emergency at this point that does not involve zombies,
right right, Well, there are According to the Christian Science
Monitor UM, there were fourteen thousand and more broadcast stations,
(26:54):
both for TV and radio plus more than uh ten
thousand cable TV station So this is all being done
at the same time. UM. And uh, it's able to
reach a lot more people. But they're already talking about
how they can reach people via text message and in
other locations. UM. You know, they're they're already talking again
(27:17):
about how they can improve this this system to make
it reach more people. UM, which is uh, you know,
kind of funny since it probably reaches more now than
it ever has before. UM. But I can imagine that
to improve it's going to do things like promoted tweets. Yeah, yeah,
well there you laugh. But I can easily imagine that.
(27:41):
It's just you know, and I absolutely see it. Um
and it Uh. It's also important to to realize that
this does more than just announced state an attack like
connal rad would. Um. There are more than I believe
eighty different kinds of messages they can use. The e
A s were including things like childhood abduction alerts seen those, yes,
(28:01):
And here here in Atlanta, we have a highway that
goes around the outside of the city known as the
Perimeter Obvious Reasons Highway or Interstate eighty five, and there
are electronic signs that they can use a lot of
a lot of times you'll see stuff like, well, there's
a traffic up ahead, or be you know, be aware
there's an accident, um. But they also use this messaging
(28:26):
on those signs as well. So that's a way for
people to uh, for the authorities to reach us with
these kinds of messages. On the side, note, how can
a highway that encircles a city that's all within one
state be an interstate? Jonathan, I'm just asking these are
questions that have that that happened in my head, and
(28:46):
I want to know why do you drive on a
parkway and parking and driveway? I also want to know
that I don't name these things, I just report them.
If our legs bent backwards, what would a chair look like?
What if there were no hypothetical questions? Oh that's terrible,
all right, So now now that we've totally killed that.
But yeah, the the ass is supposed to be able
(29:06):
to turn on certain types of radios and TVs and
other devices to allow people to receive these emergency messages,
which of course will inspire many people to go you know,
the government is trying to take over our world, um,
which is all right for them to say, I suppose,
(29:27):
but um, yeah, I mean they're they're ways for for
them to reach us in to let us know if
there's something important that we should be aware of. Um.
So you know, it really has involved quite a bit
since the nine fifties when the first system was put
into place, and similar systems to this are in place
in other countries around the world. We specifically focus on
(29:49):
this one because it's the country we live in. So again,
apologies to all of our listeners overseas. Hopefully this was
interesting to you, just on on the level of how
do you take something as simple in in concept as
getting a message out? How do you take that and
then apply it to a very complex world. And Uh,
(30:10):
it's an interesting approach. It's not necessarily the best one either.
There may be other approaches that would be um that
would be more efficient and more effective than the emergency
alert system, but you know, that's what we have. So
if you guys live in a country that has a
similar system but it works on a different way, let
us know, tell us tell us about it, you know,
(30:31):
if you're familiar with that kind of thing, because I
find it really interesting. I mean, it's a very important concept.
And it's, like I said, this is not the only
way to get it to work. Yeah, and it's it's
a challenge to reach that many people UM in a
in a very short time to let them know that
there's something big and important that they need to know
it's a matter of public safety or a public concern.
(30:51):
We've definitely come a long way from a guy on
horseback writing yelling out the British are coming, the British
are coming, or or fetivities. Yeah, could you run these
twenty six miles right come on between marathonors? Yeah. And
if you are interested in uh in hearing the bits
(31:11):
about the the e B S accident um search for
w O w O U e B S and you'll
probably come up with it pretty quickly. Um. The website
I mentioned before it is actually STL Radio dot net,
slash pages slash e B S accident dot htm. Well
that wraps up this discussion about emergency broadcast system and
(31:35):
this classic episode from two thousand twelve. I hope you
guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email. The address
is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or
pop on over to our website, that's tech stuff podcast
dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all
of our previous episodes. You'll find links to our presence
(31:56):
on various social media platforms. You'll find more information about
yours truly, and you'll find a link to our online store,
where every purchase you make goes to help the show
and we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you
guys again really soon. Y text Stuff is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
(32:19):
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
all things tech. Today, it's time for another classic episode
(00:24):
of tech Stuff. This one originally aired on August one,
two thousand twelve, and it is titled tech Stuff Tests
the Emergency Broadcast System. Chris Pilette and I decided to
sit down and really learn about the history of the
emergency broadcast system. What does it really mean? And maybe
you've actually turned on the TV when one of those
(00:46):
tests were going on and wondered what the heck is happening.
This show should answer all those questions, So take it away,
Chris and younger me. So, we wanted to do an
episode about the emergence see broadcast system. This was actually
a request that was sent in by a couple of
different listeners, which is interesting because it doesn't really technically
(01:08):
exist anymore. Now we have a new system in the
United States called the Emergency Alert System. Also, I should
apologize to all of our listeners from places other than
the United States. This is a very United States centric podcast.
But it's interesting anyway, trust me. Well it's it's become
something that's, uh, that's important in most situations too. I
mean they're they're uh tragedies and big events that happen
(01:32):
in places all over the world, so that the question
is you've got a country, um, you know, it doesn't
have to necessarily be the United States. We have a country,
have millions of people living there, and something is happening,
there's an earthquake or a tsunami or uh, some other
kind of accident um or another country is invading or
something like that. You know, something big where you need
to tell people, Hey, look out, there's something you need
(01:53):
to evacuate, you need to get out of there. How
do you address so many people in a short time? Now,
for the United States, what inspired this was the need
to reach out to people during World War two, um,
and there wasn't a system and subsequently the Cold War.
Yeah yeah, well, I mean the the whole uh, the
end of the the Second World War and it of
(02:17):
course with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan
and um, you know, it was apparent because other countries
had that technology pretty much right away, and that that
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Union began shortly after that, and then there was a
UM there was a big fear in the United States,
but about um, what would happen if the Soviet Union
(02:40):
launched a nuclear attack on the United States? How do
you warn people? And they said, well, you know, judging
by what we did in World War Two, that was
fairly effective. But we need a system, we need we
need to plan, we need to figure out how we
can do this effectively and let everybody know in a
short period of time because we're not going to have
long we need to have a short period of time,
(03:03):
a message in place. How can we reach out to people?
And that was basically the birth of UM what now
is the Emergency Alert System, but at that point was
known as connal rad yes uh in fact, which wasn't
by the way, kind of sort of an acronym for
a control of electromagnetic radiation which is kind of terrifying, right,
(03:25):
But that was established in ninety one by under the
administration of Harry S. Truman. Quick Quick Quick Trivia was
the S stand for nothing. That's right, Harry S. Truman
stood for nothing. Wait, no, that's not right. Nothing. He
just wanted it. He liked it sort of, you know,
like Michael J. So you don't say like the S
stands for nothing, like nothing isn't spelled with S. I
(03:48):
don't mean to confuse you. The S doesn't mean anything.
So control of electromagnetic radiation getting back on track. Prior
to ninety one, these alerts went out over radio station.
They would get like an emergency bulletin, and it was
pretty much up to the station whether or not they
read it. Um conal Red kind of established a specific
protocol that needed to be followed in the event of
(04:10):
an emergency, and originally the idea was that it would
alert citizens of the United States of an impending attack
from the Soviet Union. In those days, we're talking about
before intercontinental ballistic missiles, so these attacks would take the
form of bombers flying overhead, and so conal Red had
two main purposes. Really, one was to issue alerts to
(04:32):
citizens to try and get them to safety as soon
as possible in the case of the attack, and the
second was to minimize the ability of the Soviets to
target UH specific areas based on radio frequencies. So part
of the connal Red protocol was that radio stations would
shut down and they would only uh broadcast in a
(04:55):
certain amount of time and under certain frequencies. So under
the Comrade protocol you essentially had this. This is what
would happen if if someone were to issue alert. By
the way, no alert was ever issued. It was originally
called a key station system, and the idea was that
you had these dedicated telephone circuits that connected the Air
Defense control centers to certain key radio stations called basic
(05:20):
key stations. If there were an appending attack, the Air
Defense Control center would issue the alert to the key
radio stations, these basic key stations that would then issue
that same alert to relay key stations. These would be
smaller regional radio stations. Uh so they it was sort
of a hierarchy, right, It went from Air Defense Control
centers to a certain number of basic radio stations to
(05:44):
every other radio station. Once they received the alert, the
radio stations would then broadcast a predetermined message out to
the listeners. And the way it would work is that
the stations would turn off for five seconds, so they
had stopped transmitting for five seconds, come back on for
five seconds, go off for five more seconds, then come
on and transmit a tone for fifteen seconds. Now, this
(06:05):
was the the audible alert saying something is up. You
get the predetermined message. Uh, actually we're really What you
had to do was tuned to one of two frequencies.
There was a frequency kill hurts frequency and the forty
kill hurts frequency. Now, these two frequencies were the only
two that were authorized to broadcast during one of these emergencies.
(06:27):
And uh, on radios at the time, you would see
this little symbol over those those frequencies and it was
a triangle inside a circle, and that's the Civil Defense mark. Yeah,
you might remember the symbol sort of red, white and
blue if you've seen it around and uh it's still
not terribly uncommon to see it every once in a
(06:48):
while someplace. So yeah, but that was that was saying like,
these are the two frequencies. If you if your favorite
radio station isn't on, tune into this station because this
is where the information is going to come from. Uh.
It was not the best system for a couple of
different reasons. One was that it was prone to false
alarms if like an electrical storm could set off a
(07:11):
false alarm, because you're talking about electricity and radio frequencies.
There is a relationship there and we have talked about
that extensively on this podcast. So listen to our episodes
about radio to learn more about electromagnetism, radio waves, and
electricity because I can't go into it here. But the
the lightning strikes could cause false alarms, which is, you know,
a bad thing if if you've been told that this
(07:33):
alert system means that there's an impending attack from Soviet planes,
it might cause a little stress. Also, the switching mechanism,
because it would make transmitters switch on and off in
this this UH, the sequence could cause transmitters to fail
over time, just from powering up and powering down so
frequently within a certain amount of time. And then of
(07:55):
course UH this whole system, this idea of cutting off
radio contact so that you could minimize the ability for
Soviets to target in on specific regions. It became meaningless
once intercontinental ballistic missiles became a real thing, right because
now you're not talking about planes anymore. You're talking about
(08:17):
guided missiles and uh or at least targeted missiles. So
it became clear that connal red was starting to no
longer be very relevant. So they the government started to think, well,
what can we do that will provide a similar method
for us to message out emergency notices, but use a
(08:39):
different approach, and that was what sort of led into
the development of the Emergency Broadcast System e B S.
YEP in ne EBS made its debut um and uh
again it it never was used, of course, to uh,
to communicate the threat of war. Not on purpose. We'll
(09:00):
get but I'm assuming that you listened to the w
O w Um. We'll get to that. But yeah, I
mean it was a much more robust system. Um. And
it's during the Kennedy administration for those of you keeping track, yep,
yep and um. One of the nice things about it
is uh here again, well you could kind of tell
(09:24):
kind of judge the mood too. Um. If you had
heard something come over conald Rad, you probably immediately would
have thought war. But EBS was actually used for other
things too. I remember weather alerts coming in using the
exact same thing, and so you would hear and this
was used on multiple radio stations. You didn't necessarily have
(09:45):
to tune into one radio station to get your information.
It would be broadcast over TV and radio. Because you
no longer had to worry about that targeting issue. Then
meant that all the stations could be used instead of
having to tune into a specific one while everything else
is turned off. And hey, that's more effective anyway to
reach people. Um. But yeah, you would hear this this
(10:06):
tone which it's hard to explain it if you've never
heard it. You're splitting other than you're splitting and annoying
between it does get your attention. Apparently, it's the combined
the sign waves of eight hundred and fifty three hurts
and nine sixty hurts specifically chosen because it does grab
your attention because it's very jarring to hear it. It's
(10:28):
just you you can't ignore it. If you can hear
you can't ignore it. That's that's true. Um. And of course, uh,
those of us who are familiar with it other than
you know, being living somewhere where they're multiple weather uh
situations like tornadoes or tornadoes. Yeah, no kidding, Um, you
would probably have heard this through the the alerts which
(10:51):
Jonathan and I grew up with, which was testing. Yeah,
they would say they would come on and say, well,
this is a test of the emergency broadcast system and
the next sixty seconds, we will be testing out the
emergency broadcast system. It would there was actually a very
specific script that would fall and then there would be
after they would tell you there's a test coming. They
would play this tone, and then there'd be another message
(11:12):
that would appear at the end saying this was a
test the emergency broadcast system. If this had been a
real emergency, you would have received more information at this
point alerting you to blah blah blah, blah blah, we
now return you to your regularly scheduled programming type stuff.
And they were required to do this test once a week. Yeah, regular,
on a regular basis. I didn't think it was quite
that frequently. It was once a week unless you had
(11:32):
actually had to issue a real alert. If you had
to issue a real alert, could skip over some time.
But it was once a week at essentially a random
time between eight thirty in the morning and sunset at night, uh,
sometime during the week. So it wasn't that we'll get
into this too. There wasn't a time where every single
(11:53):
station had to do it at the same time. It
was unique to the various stations. And like you were saying, us,
you know these alerts went out not just for a
national emergency. In fact, they never went out on purpose
for a national emergency instead. Uh so so never it
was never used purposefully For that reason, even though that
was the genesis of this system, it was used more
(12:16):
than oh, I don't know, several thousand times to alert
for civil emergencies, sometimes an alert about to be on
the lookout for a suspect in a in a particularly
nasty crime that could be an alert, or for the
weather alerts like the ones that Chris and I grew
up with. I can remember that happening so many times. Well.
(12:39):
The uh the way the emergency broadcast system worked was
that the only message that no station could ignore or
was supposed to ignore, was a national one. Right, So,
if you are a radio station in the middle of
nowhere and the national alert goes out, you were supposed
to to broadcast it just like every other station in
(13:01):
the country, whereas if it were a local or regional
you may or may not have been able to ignore
that message and not broadcast it. The way it worked
was that, again like the Connell red system, where you
had the key stations, the basic key stations, and the
relay key stations. There was a similar setup for the
emergency broadcast system. You had these primary points of contact,
(13:26):
which would be major broadcast stations usually, but these primary
points of contact had to issue all broadcast all the
alerts they got. They had no choice because they were
a primary point of contact. But if you were further
down the chain, like you are a secondary point or
further down, then you could elect whether or not to
broadcast that alert, assuming it wasn't a national alert that
(13:48):
was the only one. Of course, everyone had to broadcast.
So um, you know there were that That explains why
you might be in an area where a weather service
alert is being broadcast, asked, and you saw it on
one channel, but you switched to another local channel, and
there's nothing that could be why. It may be that
that other channels not a primary point and therefore was
(14:10):
not required to broadcast it. Beebe. This is not a test.
This is actually us going into a commercial break. See
you on the flip side. Now, the the incident that
Jonathan mentioned, famous incident. Now I read an account of
(14:33):
this from a person who was working at a radio
station in St. Louis at the time it happened. Um,
at the time it happened, by the way, is February.
And what he had said was that every Saturday at
ten thirty three, the radio stations would receive a test
message from Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. And so basically it
(14:58):
would say and there was a code word that it
would include that would let you know that it was
was genuine. And so at ten thirty three, um, there
there was a teletype machine in the other room and
he heard it and and typically it would it would
dig a couple of times to let you know, hey,
there's something something on the wire, you know, a news
story on the wire. But this one rang ten times,
(15:21):
which he knew was a big deal. Um. And so
he ran into the other room and got a message
that said he needed to broadcast a warning that there
was an announcement coming from the national you know, from
the federal government and it was something bad and impending,
(15:41):
and be on the alert because it was time to
broadcast a message. But they really weren't told what that
message was. What it was. Well, see here's the thing. Hateful, hateful,
the you know, which was a code word, meaning that
the code that was actually a code word. The hateful
was a code word that meant there's a message is
coming up, there's an attack coming up, but more details
(16:02):
will follow. Go ahead and initiate the alert system. And
it was a mistake that was made by a teletype
operator who sent this authenticated code out to the system,
which meant it went to all those those primary points
of contact, and it didn't say it didn't say a
minute later, oops, my bad. No, no, it took a while,
and in fact, the first time they tried to resend it,
(16:24):
they sent the wrong code, so it didn't resend the message.
It was only forty minutes after the initial message was
sent out that the cancelation, the correct cancelation went out.
So what happened was actually very telling in a way
because some radio, radio and television stations, actually a lot
of them, didn't do anything at all, so they did
(16:46):
not broadcast this message, and that, in a way is
a problem because the whole purpose of the system is
to relay a national emergency to everybody. Now. Now, in
many of these cases, it may be that the people
in charge said, there's no information here, we have no
real I mean, it's a confirmed code, but there's no
confirmed information and we have nothing to share with people.
(17:09):
So Why would we go ahead and do this when
we don't have any information we could give them. Yeah,
they were standing by to broadcast whatever the major announcement
was about the attack. Right. Some of them hadn't even
signaled the alert, right, They just the programming just kept
on going. But other stations did. Some of them didn't
know what to do, so some of them weren't doing
(17:31):
it on purpose. Some of them weren't doing it because
they didn't know what they were supposed to do. And
a few actually broke into programming and said, we've received
an alert from the Emergency Broadcast System. We know that
there is a national emergency. We're a waiting for more information.
Please stand by. And what Chris was talking about earlier
was there are a couple of recordings on the internet
you can listen to that were taken from that day.
(17:55):
And one of them is from an radio station from
Fort Wayne, Indiana called w ow OH, and you can
listen to that and you can find it on the internet.
The actual it's snippets from that. It's it's been edited.
It's sorry, it's been edited down so that you get
uh sections, the important sections of of the broadcast. It's
(18:15):
about what six minutes or so long, keeping in mind
that that whole window was more like forty minutes. So
this is six minutes of footage footage from six minutes
of content from that forty minute window. Yeah. So basically
what it said was, you know, hey, there there's something
coming up. It's it's um. It's one of those things
that would be funny. If it weren't, if you don't
put yourself back at that time, I would have been terrifying.
(18:36):
It would have been terrifying because he's the person who
was on the air. Was a you could tell, was it, uh,
seasoned newsperson? Yeah, yeah, he Uh. He was very serious
and said, you know, there's there's been a message. We're
waiting word for what's going on. Uh. If you are
listening and you are one of our reporters, come here immediately.
We need you here right now. And and basically was talking, uh,
(18:59):
not only to the audience, but to the the other
reporters who might be listening. The message itself actually said,
UM message authenticator, hatefulness, hatefulness. This is an emergency action
notification directed by the President. Normal broadcasting will cease immediately.
All stations will broadcast e A N message one preceded
by the attention signal. Per FCC rules, only stations holding
(19:21):
nd N D E A may stay on the air
and according and accord with State E B S plan.
And uh that would have scared the pants off of me. Um.
And it took a while, as Jonathan said, uh, you know,
kill e A N message. It was sent in error
and it took a while for it to uh to
(19:42):
show up. But the person he the person who I was,
I was reading, I should have gotten the the U
R L if I can find it real quick for
you guys, I will um. The the person who was,
who has actually posted photos of scans of his copies
of these messages, was saying, excuse the burn marks. I
(20:02):
was smoking pretty heavily through this incidents. It was kind
of stressed out. If you listen to the recording from
the w O w oh incident, you actually hear the
the newscaster kind of chuckling once the once the order
was sent out about this was a mistake, and you know,
(20:22):
kind of kind of because you know, clearly it was
one of those stressful things and the chuckling is him
releasing that stress, and it is an interesting moment in
history to kind of pick up on that. Um So, yeah,
not that was the only time that a national alert
went out across the system. And again it wasn't a
real one, it was a mistake. UM. And then what
(20:44):
was supposed to happen is that, depending upon the nature
of the emergency UH, stations are supposed to read from
a predetermined script like it's it's They're not supposed to
just you know, kind of provide commentary on it. There's
a specific message that needs to be relayed and um.
So that was the general purpose of the Emergency Broadcast System,
(21:05):
but it was starting to show its age, UH, particularly
in the nineties, because you started to have other methods
of getting content on your television besides broadcast TV, and
the Emergency Broadcast System really affected radio and broadcast television.
So there needed to be an overhaul of the system,
(21:25):
and that's what happened in the late nineties, and in
ninety eight you had the Emergency Alert System take its place.
And now you might say, well, what's the difference. Well,
for one thing, it doesn't just include broadcast stations. It
also includes cable and participating satellite systems. So now you've
got other methods of broadcast or or you know, other
(21:47):
methods of getting content over your television included in this.
So that way, if a citizen is watching cable television
or something on satellite TV, they could still have access
to an emergency message because clearly, you know, you don't
want to leave everybody out. As as people have more
and more ways of watching stuff, it's harder to reach
(22:07):
them in a centralized way. Yeah, these these systems were
developed to run on AM and FM radio and the
local broadcast stations. So now we've gone from in the
United States, UM, let's say, on average, probably three or
four regular network broadcast stations, maybe a couple independence in
the larger you know, larger cities, something in the ultra
(22:29):
high frequency. Yeah, you know, maybe six or six to
ten stations in big big markets. Um. Then you go
to dozens or even hundreds of stations now with cable
and satellite UM, you know, plus uh, you know the
radio stations which have exploded in number, um, satellite radio
and all the other media that we listen to. Now.
(22:51):
So yeah, the system, there's a lot of people, know,
the system needed to to evolve with that development, and
of course even now we're still we're already seeing a
need for that too, find another way of reaching people,
because as people start to use the Internet to get content,
now there's yet another avenue for information to get to them.
(23:11):
But you know, this system was not designed with that
in mind, so there's already another need coming out. Chris
and I have a bit more to say about the
emergency broadcast system, but first let's take another quick break.
The way it works now, the National Weather Service actually
(23:34):
has specific codes that they can attached to notices so
that those digital codes will send the message just to
the relevant regions. So that way, if there if the
National Weather Service detects that there's going to be you know,
a massive hurricane hitting the panhandle of Florida, it can
send an alert to say, Texas and Florida and you know, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
(24:00):
all those areas that could potentially be affected by heavy rains, winds,
that sort of stuff, and the rest of the nation
is unaffected, or even the rest you know, the rest
of certain states, like the northern part of the state
might not be affected because they're far enough away from
the coast where at least it's not gonna be an
immediate effect, they might not get the message either. Uh.
(24:21):
And it's so that the right information gets to the
right people. And it makes sense, you know, you don't
want to send out a message to the entire nation
that for something it's just going to affect a relatively
small um area of the nation as a whole. United
States is big, so uh, yeah, it was. It's something
that that has evolved over time. The and the other
(24:44):
thing I was going to talk about was what happened
on November nine. Yeah. Um, there is one sort of
interesting footnote UM to the the e B S ERA
passing from to the e A S era. UM. E
B S was not activated during the September eleven, two
thousand and one attacks. Um, which is kind of interesting
(25:07):
that they chose not to do, uh to use the
alert at that time, particularly since the attacks affected multiple
targets in multiple cities. So it is would have affected
even more had not the flight in Pennsylvania gone down.
So just just sort of an interesting footnote there. Um.
(25:27):
But Yes, on November nine, uh, the e A S
made its debut. Yeah, and the system had been in place,
but what happened was because the system was fail the
E A S was actually what would have been used
in September eleven, right, So, so on November what happened
(25:48):
was it was tested nationally and this was the first
time any of these systems had ever been tested on
a national level, meaning that every participating station was going
to display the test at the same time, and that
time was going to be UM. It was two pm
Eastern for on November, which means that if you didn't
(26:12):
know about it ahead of time and you turned on
your television, you would see this alert and you think, oh,
this is irritating this that one of those stupid tests.
Change the channel and that alert is still going and
it's going on this ocean. Oh, this is something. And
so there were a lot of messages that were sent
out before two pm November to let people know, Hey,
(26:32):
this is gonna happen. Don't worry, the zombies aren't here yet,
right or whatever other national emergency you might be able
to conjure up in your mind. I just cannot imagine
a national emergency at this point that does not involve zombies,
right right, Well, there are According to the Christian Science
Monitor UM, there were fourteen thousand and more broadcast stations,
(26:54):
both for TV and radio plus more than uh ten
thousand cable TV station So this is all being done
at the same time. UM. And uh, it's able to
reach a lot more people. But they're already talking about
how they can reach people via text message and in
other locations. UM. You know, they're they're already talking again
(27:17):
about how they can improve this this system to make
it reach more people. UM, which is uh, you know,
kind of funny since it probably reaches more now than
it ever has before. UM. But I can imagine that
to improve it's going to do things like promoted tweets. Yeah, yeah,
well there you laugh. But I can easily imagine that.
(27:41):
It's just you know, and I absolutely see it. Um
and it Uh. It's also important to to realize that
this does more than just announced state an attack like
connal rad would. Um. There are more than I believe
eighty different kinds of messages they can use. The e
A s were including things like childhood abduction alerts seen those, yes,
(28:01):
And here here in Atlanta, we have a highway that
goes around the outside of the city known as the
Perimeter Obvious Reasons Highway or Interstate eighty five, and there
are electronic signs that they can use a lot of
a lot of times you'll see stuff like, well, there's
a traffic up ahead, or be you know, be aware
there's an accident, um. But they also use this messaging
(28:26):
on those signs as well. So that's a way for
people to uh, for the authorities to reach us with
these kinds of messages. On the side, note, how can
a highway that encircles a city that's all within one
state be an interstate? Jonathan, I'm just asking these are
questions that have that that happened in my head, and
(28:46):
I want to know why do you drive on a
parkway and parking and driveway? I also want to know
that I don't name these things, I just report them.
If our legs bent backwards, what would a chair look like?
What if there were no hypothetical questions? Oh that's terrible,
all right, So now now that we've totally killed that.
But yeah, the the ass is supposed to be able
(29:06):
to turn on certain types of radios and TVs and
other devices to allow people to receive these emergency messages,
which of course will inspire many people to go you know,
the government is trying to take over our world, um,
which is all right for them to say, I suppose,
(29:27):
but um, yeah, I mean they're they're ways for for
them to reach us in to let us know if
there's something important that we should be aware of. Um.
So you know, it really has involved quite a bit
since the nine fifties when the first system was put
into place, and similar systems to this are in place
in other countries around the world. We specifically focus on
(29:49):
this one because it's the country we live in. So again,
apologies to all of our listeners overseas. Hopefully this was
interesting to you, just on on the level of how
do you take something as simple in in concept as
getting a message out? How do you take that and
then apply it to a very complex world. And Uh,
(30:10):
it's an interesting approach. It's not necessarily the best one either.
There may be other approaches that would be um that
would be more efficient and more effective than the emergency
alert system, but you know, that's what we have. So
if you guys live in a country that has a
similar system but it works on a different way, let
us know, tell us tell us about it, you know,
(30:31):
if you're familiar with that kind of thing, because I
find it really interesting. I mean, it's a very important concept.
And it's, like I said, this is not the only
way to get it to work. Yeah, and it's it's
a challenge to reach that many people UM in a
in a very short time to let them know that
there's something big and important that they need to know
it's a matter of public safety or a public concern.
(30:51):
We've definitely come a long way from a guy on
horseback writing yelling out the British are coming, the British
are coming, or or fetivities. Yeah, could you run these
twenty six miles right come on between marathonors? Yeah. And
if you are interested in uh in hearing the bits
(31:11):
about the the e B S accident um search for
w O w O U e B S and you'll
probably come up with it pretty quickly. Um. The website
I mentioned before it is actually STL Radio dot net,
slash pages slash e B S accident dot htm. Well
that wraps up this discussion about emergency broadcast system and
(31:35):
this classic episode from two thousand twelve. I hope you
guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email. The address
is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or
pop on over to our website, that's tech stuff podcast
dot com. There you're gonna find an archive of all
of our previous episodes. You'll find links to our presence
(31:56):
on various social media platforms. You'll find more information about
yours truly, and you'll find a link to our online store,
where every purchase you make goes to help the show
and we greatly appreciate it. And I'll talk to you
guys again really soon. Y text Stuff is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
(32:19):
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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