At 2:00 today, the Emergency Alert System will conduct a national test, stopping programming for 30 seconds on every mainstream broadcast media outlet in the country. Why?
According to the FCC’s EAS website, because. . .
“…there has never been an end-to-end, nationwide test of the system, and we need to know that the system will work as intended should public safety officials ever need to send an alert or warning to a large region of the United States. Only a top-down, simultaneous test of all components of the EAS can provide an appropriate diagnosis of system-wide performance.”
So we do this test, and we’re ready to stop the nation’s broadcasts simultaneously to get a single message out.
You probably won’t notice.
