East Coast Not In Danger After All
By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Travel Blogger
Another false alarm of a potential disaster has happened in the USA.
Just a few weeks after the a missile alert in Hawaii, a tsunami alert was sent out for the East Coast.
It, too, proved to be a test. Several weather outlets picked it up and so, too, did several media outlets.
A tweet from the National Weather Service (NWS) in Charleston, South Carolina, said the alert was sent around 8:30 a.m. ET. But it was a test, not an actual tsunami.
“We have been notified that some users received this test message as an actual Tsunami Warning,” the NWS tweeted, adding that a tsunami warning was “not in effect.”
“The test message was released by at least one private sector company as an official Tsunami Warning, resulting in widespread reports of tsunami warnings received via phones and other media across the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean,” the NWS said in a statement to NBC News.
“We’re currently looking into why the test message was communicated as an actual tsunami warning, and will provide more information as soon as we have it,” the NWS said.
Among the weather forecasters who passed along the alert was AccuWeather.com, which then released this statement:
“This morning AccuWeather passed on a National Weather Service Tsunami Warning that was intended by the NWS to be a test but was miscoded by the NWS as a real warning. AccuWeather has the most sophisticated system for passing on NWS tsunami warnings based on a complete computer scan of the codes used by the NWS. While the words “TEST” were in the header, the actual codes read by computers used coding for real warning, indicating it was a real warning.
“The NWS warning also later appeared on other sources such as The Weather Channel and it even appears on some pages of the NWS own website as a real warning. The NWS is the original source of the information and displayed it as a real warning.
“Tsunami warnings are handled with the utmost concern by AccuWeather and it has sophisticated algorithms to scan the entire message, not just header words, as from the time of a warning to the actual event can be mere minutes. AccuWeather was correct in reading the mistaken NWS codes embedded in the warning. The responsibility is on the NWS to properly and consistently code the messages, for only they know if the message is correct or not.
“As reported by AccuWeather, once discovered that the NWS had incorrectly coded the warning, we sent messages via social channels that no tsunami warning is in effect for the East Coast of the U.S.”
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