Emergency Broadcast System Tests

Hi peeps, first thread so take it easy on me lol. For as long as I can remember I have seen a test of the emergency broadcast system at the most about once a month.

In the last few days I have seen aprox 4 or 5 tests of the Utah EBS. What ever happened with the Jan 21st or 22nd crisis? Are they ramping up for something or just business as usual?

Has anyone else in other areas noticed increased tests?

[edit on 27-1-2009 by Reaper106]

What 21st or 22nd crisis?

Hopefully you aren't talking about Colin Powell's statement, which was taken completely out of context.

Originally posted by phantom23
What 21st or 22nd crisis?

Hopefully you aren't talking about Colin Powell's statement, which was taken completely out of context.

Yes I was talking about Colin Powell's remarks, although I was not loosing any sleep over that. I hardly ever thought about that but after the last few days of testing the EBS well it just got me to thinking.

I was just telling my wife the other day it seems to be 3 or 4 a week here N.E. Florida and I was very interested in why but can not find much info on EBS.

Do a search on any Comcast customer board and notice that Comcast cable customers have been plagued for the past 2 months with sporadic EBS shutdowns of our cable boxes. I've had several in one day recently. You'll be sitting watching a game and suddenly the box displays 'EBS' and it switches to CSPAN which is showing nothing even remotely related to an emergency (unless you count the disaster of any Congressman or Senator opening their mouth and speaking as an emergency). In the previous 4 years as a Comcast customer, I have never once seen this happen, even during 'testing' the system has simply played the warning sound and run a crawler across the screen with the "This is a test.... if this had been an actual emergency... " yadda, yadda, yadda.

It definitely has made me wonder what's up.

Appologies, on Comcast it is the EAS, not the EBS. Here's an example of what I was talking about...

www.broadbandreports.com...

I had actually contemplated making a thread about this last week.

One of these day's I'll sign up for an account...

Funny you should mention it. I live in eastern Iowa, and my cable provider, Mediacom, usually runs their tests at about 2 in the morning it seems like. Well, the other day during the inauguration, right after the oath, and right when Obama got up to start giving his speech, he got maybe a few words out of his mouth and then the screen went blank and the EBS came on. Scared the heck out of me, then it turned out it was just a test. I thought it odd that they chose that EXACT moment, when probably more people were watching than at any other time or day that week to run the test.

So... make of that what you will.

I work for comcast and had not heard of this issue in Washington for us. I have on the other hand seen this or heard these a lot lately.

reply to post by whoshotJR


As in the state of Washington? I live in King County. Admittedly, I haven't asked anyone about this locally nor have I called Comcast about it. I had initially treated it as a mere inconvenience, but after so many times I started to wonder if it was something more nefarious.