JUNEAU, Alaska — A third-party vendor is being blamed for a mistaken tsunami alert broadcast on Alaska TV and radio stations last month.
Dennis Bookey, co-chair of the Alaska State Emergency Communications Committee, said that this and similar incidents suggest the format of the National Weather Service’s internal testing system for tsunamis should be reviewed.
Bookey’s comments came in a written account dated 10 days after the errant alert was broadcast on May 11. It was provided this week to The Associated Press by Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for Alaska’s emergency management division.
Zidek said improvements are being made to the Emergency Alert System, and in this case, updated codes were not recognized.
According to Bookey, the vendor’s weather processing server failed to recognize the tsunami warning as a test. He said in an interview Tuesday that the software coding issue was corrected after it was discovered.
The system is complex, but not perfect, he said. And incidents like this, while rare, can hurt the credibility of the system, he said.
He cited three similar incidents this year, including an errant message received by users of the popular AccuWeather app along the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
In those cases and in Alaska, the Tsunami Warning Center, which is part of the National Weather Service, sent out a message that “says it’s the real thing and a test.” The information identifying it as a test has to be read by software, he wrote.
That doesn’t take the vendor off the hook, he said. But it lends credence to calls to review the formatting used by the weather service, he said.
“Maybe there isn’t any way to change it, but I think a review would be just in everybody’s best interest,” he said.
Jonathan Porter, vice president of business services for AccuWeather, said his organization also has asked the weather service to review how test messages are encoded.
“Many of the tests may be OK, but if there’s an issue with the encoding and the format of it, then it results in the product potentially being mischaracterized as a valid warning message and distributed,” he said.
The National Weather Service says hundreds of vendors redistribute its messages and when it finds problems it works with vendors to address them.
