Emergency Alert System

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public via cable, satellite and broadcast television and AM, FM and satellite radio. Informally, Emergency Alert System is sometimes conflated with its mobile phone counterpart Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), a different but related system. However, both the EAS and WEA, among other systems, are coordinated under the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). The EAS, and more broadly IPAWS, allows federal, state, and local authorities to efficiently broadcast emergency alert and warning messages across multiple channels. The EAS became operational on January 1, 1997, after being approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in November 1994, replacing the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), and largely supplanted similar local Emergency Override Systems, though the latter is still used from time to time. Its main improvement over the EBS, and perhaps its most distinctive feature, is its application of a digitally encoded audio signal known as Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME), which is responsible for the "screeching" or "beeping" sounds at the start and end of each message. The first signal is the "header" which encodes, among other information, the alert type and locations, or the specific area that should receive the message. The last short burst marks the end-of-message. These signals are read by specialized encoder-decoder equipment. This design allows for automated station-to-station relay of alerts to only the area the alert was intended for. Like the Emergency Broadcast System, the system is primarily designed to allow the president of the United States to address the country via all radio and television stations in the event of a national emergency. Despite this, neither the system nor its predecessors have been used in this...