Day We Didn't Die

[Dave]

Came across this earlier today ....





The Day We Didn't Die


The Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) scare

I do remember this incident from 1971. I was living in the Binghamton area and when all the stations went off the air, I was in the car driving somewhere. It was reminiscent of JFK's assassination in 1963 when WTLB in Utica immediately switched from rock to classical music when the news arrived from Dallas.

Personal account by a DJ at:

stlradio.net/pages/ebsaccident.htm

[fiona]

I don't remember this at all. Fill us in about it. it's interesting and also very frighytening. Where did you find this?

[Dave]

There's not much more to the story other than what's on the web page referenced above. Google the date in February noted above if you want to pursue it. Having worked in a radio station, I remember the CONELRAD receiver, although I don't remember anyone listening to it. But that's probably because we had an "air signal." The programming ran all the time on the PA system, but it didn't come from the studio. It came off the air, so that in essence you were listening to the transmitter and if anything went wrong the technical personnel would hear it and go fix it.

So if your transmitter was automatically relayed off when the EBS signal came in, that's how you found out .. you would no longer hear yourself. A friend told me whenever he lost his own voice in his headphones, his imagination would run wild and he would wonder why he hadn't seen the flash of the atomic detonation and wonder how long before the shock wave would arrive.

[Dave]

From Wiki (of course), the following:

False alarm of 1971

Despite these safeguards, the system was inadvertently activated at 9:33 AM EST on February 20, 1971. Teletype operator W. S. Eberhardt accidentally "played the wrong tape" during a test of the system.[3] As a result, an EBS activation message authenticated with the codeword "hatefulness" was sent through the entire system, ordering stations to cease regular programming and broadcast the alert of a national emergency. A cancellation message was sent at 9:59 AM EST; however, it used the same codeword again. A cancellation message with the correct codeword, "impish," was not sent until 10:13 AM EST.[4]

This false alarm demonstrated major flaws in the EBS. Many stations had not received the alert, but more importantly, the vast majority of those that did ignored it, or did not know what to do during an emergency [5]. The only station in the country that shut down as mandated by FCC rules was WSNS-TV (Ch 44) in Chicago[citation needed], which broadcast the 1971 events as they happened, a rare recording of which has become available from WOWO.

Numerous investigations were launched, and several changes were made to the EBS. Among them, the on-air alert announcement was streamlined, eliminating language that warned the audience of an imminent attack against the country."


Above is about halfway down the page at:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System#False_alarm_of_1971