What is the Emergency Alert System on the Radio?

Jarod and the midnight raider are both partly right and a lot wrong. The EAS or Emergency Alert System was established by the FCC to replace the old EBS, Emergency Broadcast System to better serve the public by warning of many things. Severe weather, avalanche, tsunami, tornado’s, freezes, 911 system outages, and civil alerts are just some. Later we added the AMBER alerts for abducted children. Each radio station is required to test once a week and once a month the primary stations in each area must test and then the others must relay to show the system works. The national weather service is also active in it’s transmitters on this system in most areas. the station you were listening to screwd up by not sending the bursts. The minimum test is three data bursts followed by three more end of message bursts. If it’s the real thing there will be about 8 secnds of a very irritating two tone before an announcement. No actual announcement is required for a test although many do that. The data bursts contain the information on originator, type of test or actual alert, duration and time of activation. The actual alerts can be originated by many different sources, depending on the state plan. Here in Nevada all alerts on the state level must go through the state police, but on the local level, emergency managers, fire chiefs and police chiefs can originate (or their designated assistants). The National Weather service can originate weather warnings. The president can originate a message and that is tested once per year, but not relayed to the public. It is a system to alert to impending danger and not some news flash thing, thus it was not used during 911 since there was no warning. It is being improved regularly and works well when supported by the local broadcasters.