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After listening to the radio and channel-surfing television stations Wednesday afternoon, Omahan Sean Weide knows how he would grade the results of the nation's first test of its emergency alert system: a failure.
Weide said a cable sports station he was watching went silent for about 15 minutes but ran a crawl over its news feed. Other stations had dull screens with messages in Spanish or English but no clear information about what was happening. And at least one Omaha radio station sounded no alert at all, said Weide, who works in public relations.
"I don't think I was effectively notified — if anything I was very confused by everything I saw," he said.
Emergency officials share Weide's assessment.
"It wasn't a perfect test — let me just say that," said Paul Johnson, director of Douglas County Emergency Management, whose staff listened to four radio stations and found the test difficult to hear. "We have some work to do."
The problem, however, appears to be a national one.
Counties across Nebraska reported problems with the test, said Jodie Fawl, spokeswoman for the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency. Likewise, she said, other states are reporting problems.
Scant information was available at the federal level. A spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency could not be reached. However, the agency blogged: "Based on preliminary data, media outlets in large portions of the country successfully received the test message, but it wasn't received by some viewers or listeners."
Jim Skinner, chairman of the Nebraska Emergency Communications Committee, and Nancy Finken, radio network manager at NET, said the national signal arrived distorted.
Because of the distortion, Skinner said the audio was garbled and unintelligible.
In the event of a real emergency, that garbled audio would have been the president's voice or that of his designated representative.
"Even though this national test went very poorly, it helps us fix things so that when a national alert needs to be sounded, it's more likely to work," Skinner said.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1102, nancy.gaarder@owh.com
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