An error with Alaska’s emergency alert system caused a false tsunami warning alarm about 7 a.m. Friday morning.
Bryan Fisher, incident commander for the Alaska State Emergency Operations Center, said by phone that an internal test was picked up by the state’s emergency system and broadcast on television and radio as an actual warning.
“It wasn’t ever intended to go out over the emergency alert system,” he said by phone.
There is no Tsunami Warning currently for Alaska and/or the West Coast. We issued a routine communications test message at 7am AKST that has been misinterpreted. We are investigating this issue. Repeat: There is NO Tsunami Warning
— NWS Tsunami Alerts (@NWS_NTWC) May 11, 2018
The test was intended to be internal only, between tsunami warning centers and broadcast agencies throughout Alaska, Hawaii, British Columbia and the West Coast.
The test was done to determine how quickly tsunami information can spread through the alert system.
No other states experienced the error Alaska did, and Fisher said the state is working with the company that manufactures the alert system’s components to determine what went wrong.
He said the initial impression is that the test somehow triggered a message pre-prepared for an actual emergency.
Anyone who viewed the alert on TV at 7 a.m. saw a blue screen with white lettering about a tsunami warning for the entire coast of the Gulf of Alaska. An audio message played at the same time, with only one mention of a test, and that at the end of the broadcast. There was no mention of a test in the text display.
TV and radio stations who carried the alert and were contacted by the Empire said they received numerous calls from viewers and listeners.
The erroneous test comes four months after an actual warning that sent Alaskans scrambling for higher ground following an earthquake near Kodiak.
There was no tsunami in that case because the ground movement during the undersea quake was horizontal instead of vertical. Had the movement been vertical, a tsunami would have resulted.
Friday’s error also comes in the wake of an erroneous ballistic missile alert in Hawaii. That false alert terrified residents of the islands in January.
• Contact reporter James Brooks at jbrooks@juneauempire.com or 523-2258.
