This Is Not A Test!

This Is Not A Test! was Originally Posted on February 12, 2013 by lavarock

I have written about this before and today’s news reminds me that this is a great time to bring it up again.

I was a Disc Jockey (air personality) back in the day. During my formative college days I would zip on over from Virginia to the Kentucky state line and head up the mountain. That intersection is depicted in a chase scene in the movie “Fire Down Below”. Now that little intersection is a large super highway instead of a 2 lane road between the states.

To get to the station, I had to drive many miles and then up the mountainous and twisty road to that intersection, then up a dirt road to the station. During snow storms we would have to park at that intersection and get a 4-wheel drive ride up the rutted dirt road the station. If a snowstorm came during the day, we would camp out up there. years later the studios would be moved into town.

The radio station was a self-supporting tower, 2000 feet above sea level and 1000 feet above average terrain. At its base was a mobile home that served as the station business offices and studios. As you entered the door, you found a couple of desks. To your left was a small room with a glass window opening to the office. As you walked down the hall that way you passed the room with the transmitters, then a bathroom and in the back, what we used as the production studio where we recorded commercials. On your right, the back end of the trailer, was a door going outside. Not far from the back door was an outhouse of sorts. I do not remember it as a porta-potty but an outhouse.

The area containing the radio station was part of a national forest and thus, except for the tower, everything was removable. Also, as you walked away from the trailer and northward, you would find a very small building with some electronics and outside the building, a number of TV antennas stuck in the dirt. They were part of the Jenkins Kentucky cable TV system.

Since then the trailer has been removed and a small building built there for the transmitter. It can be seen in Google Earth at this location: 37 deg 09’52.57″ N 82 deg 37’24.29″ W. the shadow of the tower can be seen in this particular image.

So it came to be that at that location, I was involved in the Nuclear War that didn’t happen.

The story is written about here: http://jeff560.tripod.com/am6.html and called “‘Nuclear Alert’ Proves False”. I still have a Xeroxed copy of that “hatefullness” message somewhere I think.

I was on my way to the station that day while another DJ was on the air. As I came up the mountain, I don’t remember if he had played the emergency tape or I heard it on another station. In any event, I arrived minutes into the “alert”.

Having been prepared in advance, when either a test or alert is issued, each station broadcasts a message and then takes action based upon their procedure. That message is probably familiar to you, starting “This is a test. For the next 60 seconds, this station will conduct a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test.”

In an actual emergency the text is closer to “This is not a test. The president has declared a national emergency.” (The authenticator word as I remember also indicated whether we had advanced warning or it was more like our 9-11 catastrophe where we were already under attack).

The eerie thing about these tapes, the part that made me shiver was that since the tape was recorded perhaps months earlier, while there was no emergency, and recorded in a calm voice, a soothing voice, was odd enough. But the really eerie thing was that while that tape played over the air to the thousands of listeners, that soothing voice, that calming voice, was mine!

As I entered the station the DJ was not quite sure what to do. I had read all the documents and was slightly calmer. I knew that this alert came over the teletype news machine at the exact time as our weekly test. That was odd and could be a mistake, however the thought that stuck in the back of my mind was, if I was a foreign country wanting to invade the U.S. what a great time to do it when everybody expects a test. (This is the same issue we have in Hawaii with our monthly scheduled tsunami test. In the event of a real tsunami, the test is postponed. So if by chance a tsunami happens at the same time as our monthly test and the siren goes off, who would know that it is a real tsunami alert?)

Our radio station was not very powerful and was not a primary station for our region. That station played the message and went off the air (I assume the DJ ran for cover). Our normal procedure was to play the message and go off the air, having directed our listeners to tune to the regional station for information. This limited the stations transmitting during an emergency to a few high powered stations who will not interfere with each other.

The procedures also called for the case where the primary station was not on the air (either because it was destroyed, incapacitated or had technical developments). That procedure required that we come on the air and take over. We did that.

As the command people in Cheyenne Mountain tried to correct their problem, they manually typed the rescind order (without the proper code word). What usually was a quick, mechanically generated printout was now a slow and methodical “cancel cancel” message typed a letter at a time. It included the previous used code word which was NOT the cancel code “impish”. It was a while before the correction was issued and the “alert” was cancelled.

In the ensuing days we were required to report to the FCC what had happened at our station and how we handled the emergency. The response from the FCC was that my decision to return to the air was exactly correct and that we had followed protocol correctly.

As an aside, knowing FCC regulations is useful. For example, we were a daytime station AM station which must shut down at sunset and come on at sunrise. Unless performing maintenance, it was illegal to transmit outside those hours. However, in the case of threatening storm, freezing that would effect crops, etc, you COULD come on the air during what you might consider a local emergency. It was up to you to report this deviation to the FCC and they would evaluate your reason for illegal operation and if justified, would ignore the infraction. The FCC had procedures that even in a national emergency, if you deviated from the procedures, if it was reasonable to do that, you were safe. In this national emergency, we did not deviate.

So with all that history, what brought this to mind today? It was this Associated Press news item:

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) – A Montana television station’s regular programming was interrupted by news of a zombie apocalypse.

The Montana Television Network says hackers broke into the Emergency Alert System of Great Falls affiliate KRTV and its CW station Monday.

KRTV says on its website the hackers broadcast that “dead bodies are rising from their graves” in several Montana counties.

In both cases, the Emergency Broadcasting/Alert System was involved with a National Emergency, This time the code word must have been “ZOMBIES”!