tsunami false alarm accuweather national weather service

Petra Bensted/Flickr (CC-BY)

First missiles, now tsunami—yet another false alert rocks the U.S.

Hawaii wasn't a fluke after all.

 

Phillip Tracy

Tech

Posted on Feb 7, 2018   Updated on May 22, 2021, 1:45 am CDT

You may want to quickly check Twitter the next time you receive an alert notification on your smartphone. The popular Accuweather app accidentally sent out a tsunami alarm to users on the East Coast on Tuesday morning, the latest in a series of embarrassing false alarm errors.

The message was sent at 8:30am ET as a test but ended up transmitting an actual tsunami alert, waking AccuWeather users who had smartphone notifications turned on, reports the Herald Tribune. It reached users on the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean.

The botched alarm is supposedly conducted on a monthly basis to test how long it takes to send and receive alerts, the National Weather Service in Miami said via Twitter.

While it was clearly a test to users who opened the full message, the abbreviated push notification simply stated “Tsunami Warning.”

Tsunami Warning

 

Tsunami Warning in effect until 9:28 AM EST. Source: U.S. National Weather Service
…THIS_MESSAGE_IS_FOR_TEST_PURPOSES_ONLY…

…THIS IS A TEST TO DETERMINE TRANSMISSION TIMES INVOLVED IN THE
DISSEMINATION OF TSUNAMI INFORMATION…

AccuWeather blames the National Weather Service (NWS) for the mixup. It claims the text of the message labeled the alert as a test, but the NWS’s computer “miscoded” the message as an actual warning and sent it out to the public. Accuweather said in a statement, “The responsibility is on the NWS to properly and consistently code the messages, for only they know if the message is correct or not.”

The NWS is still trying to figure out what happened and has not responded to AccuWeather’s comments.

The incident comes less than a month after an alarm sent in error warned Hawaiian residents of a ballistic missile attack. The message, which caused widespread panic throughout the islands, read “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Following an FCC investigation, it was determined that the alarm was sent by a worker who believed there was an actual threat.

Last month, the FCC voted to improve the national emergency alert system so officials can target alerts to more precise locations. The new legislation, which will go into effect in November 2019, gives state employees the ability to send out alerts within a tenth of a mile of any given area.

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*First Published: Feb 7, 2018, 11:00 am CST