No one pushed the wrong button. That is the official assessment from the broadcast co-chair of the Alaska State Emergency Communications Committee regarding the false tsunami EAS alert that was broadcast over the air and to cable systems on May 11.

In a statement sent to the Alaska Broadcast Association and shared with Radio World, Broadcast Co-Chair Dennis Bookey said that on the morning of May 11, Alaska broadcast stations and cable systems carried one (and in some cases two) tsunami warnings that were actually a test — not a real alert — sent by the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.

[Read: Another False EAS Alert, This One Ringing Out In Alaska]

Specifically, the Alaska EAS system uses a commercial vendor to supply an additional relay primarily for tsunami and AMBER EAS activations. This system, the Emergency Management Network (EMnet), is an internet and satellite-based system capable of distributing both EAS and CAP messages that is managed by the vendor Comlabs. The network delivers messages to the state’s series of 22 LP-1 stations, the Alaska Rural Communications Service, Alaska Public Radio News and other key input points across the state. EMnet in turn is hooked up to the National Weather Service Weather Wire, which carries all warnings and has to filter out the test.

On the morning of May 11, Bookey said, some coding contained within the vendor’s weather processing server failed to recognize the tsunami warning as a test.

“This allowed the test to pass through to the LP-1s and be carried over the air and daisy-chained to all the stations and systems monitoring their LP-1s in the warned areas,” he said. Parts of the Alaska EAS system for tsunami warnings are automated because lives are at stake and in the case of a real tsunami, every second counts, Bookey added.

Bookey said that the issue has since been rectified.

Bookey also clarified to broadcast association members that no one received a WEA alert on their phone. The NOAA Weather Radio did not send out an alert. No tsunami sirens went off and no evacuations were started, Bookey said.

In response to the false alert, Bookey said the website tsunami.gov posted a large green banner clarifying that no warnings were in effect.

“Fortunately, with this happening on a weekday and during morning drive, broadcasters were quickly able to get the false alert information to the airwaves,” Bookey said.

But Bookey clarified that none of these mitigating factors take away from the hit that EAS has again taken to its credibility.

“Some stations had to field a tremendous amount of phone calls on the false alert. Those of us that work hard to make Alaska’s EAS warning system as reliable and credible as possible are more than sorry to see that happen,” he said. “All I can tell you is that we will continue to work as hard as possible to improve the system with the resources and format architecture given to us.”

In Alaska as elsewhere, the EAS system uses three-letter activation codes for each kind of alert while other tests — namely the monthly test, weekly test and national periodic test — all have special independent codes.

On May 11, the Tsunami Warning Center sent out a TSW code — the same as a real activation — but included a test identifier elsewhere in the message that has to be read by software. “So in reality, the message says it’s the real thing and a test,” he said.

But this doesn’t take the equipment provider working with EMnet off the hook, he said. “It never should have happened. But the fact that it keeps happening … suggests … that the format of the internal testing system for tsunamis [needs] a second look.”

Several other false tsunami alerts have happened since the beginning of 2018, including one in Texas and another in New York.

In January, Alaska’s director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management told the Anchorage Daily News that Alaska’s EAS system would not be as vulnerable to a false ballistic missile alarm, such as the one that occurred on January 13 in Hawaii.

 “We don’t have a simple button that you would hit, and it could be the wrong button,” Mike Sutton, the state’s director, told the newspaper. “We have to manually create the message, type in a password, click multiple buttons and then, before you transmit, the system is going to ask the operator to type ‘Yes’ before you are allowed to actually proceed.”  

ANCHORAGE, AK—Another emergency warning misstep seems to have occurred — this time in Alaska — when the National Tsunami Warning Center issued a supposedly routine communications test at 7 a.m. on Friday, May 11, that was interpreted as a real warning.

A truncated version of a routine tsunami test message was issued by the center, and then “broadcast as an erroneous warning over the Emergency Alert System in Alaska,” the agency said. According to the Anchorage Daily News, those watching TV or listening to the radio at 7 a.m. heard what seemed to be a tsunami warning for areas all along the West Coast of North America and Hawaii.

Although there was a short mention of a test message at the very end of the automated warning, the message seemed to be legitimate warning for coastal counties on the West Coast of North America, according to reporter Zaz Hollander with the Daily News.

Alaska resident Travis Neff told the Daily News that a warning broke in while he was driving to work and listening to an interview about North Korea on NPR.

“At that very moment the alert system began,” he told the newspaper in an email. “I was dumbfounded. It was such a macabre timing, so I was poised waiting to hear that it was 'just a test' and that never occurred.”

The message apparently did not reach the public in Oregon, Washington, California or British Columbia, and was received only by individuals in Alaska, the paper said. The test message did not go out to the public via any communication channels operated by the National Weather Service, nor were messages sent out over the Wireless Emergency Alert system to cellphones. No sirens sounded in tsunami-vulnerable towns like Seward or Kodiak and no message was transmitted over NOAA Weather Radio.

Chris Popham with the National Tsunami Warning Center told the newspaper that phones were ringing off the hook in the two hours after the alert went out. According to Popham, an oceanographer with the agency, those calls were the catalyst that let officials at the center know there was a problem.

“Nothing different happened in this office,” he told the paper. “We sent out the same test message we’ve sent for decades: ‘This is a communications test.’ We saturate it with ‘test.’ How that got interpreted as any sort of warning or advisory, I can’t say.”

At noon on Friday May 11, the National Weather Service released a statement saying that no tsunami warnings have been issued for Alaska. “There is no tsunami threat,” the statement said.

Agencies involved are investigating what happened.

A state emergency spokesman told the Daily News that the tsunami center coded the message properly as a monthly test and that the problem appeared to start with the state’s emergency communications network, EMnet, operated by Florida-based vendor ComLabs.

But Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told the newspaper that an investigation was too preliminary to determine whether the problem was the coding, the network, or something that occurred at the interface of the two. The state is working to determine what happened, Hollander reported.

The situation is reminiscent of the false missile warning that occurred in Hawaii in January.

[Read: Human Error, Poor Safeguards Contribute To False Missile Alarm, FCC Finds]

Mike Chmielewski, chief operating officer for nonprofit Radio Free Palmer, told the paper that he called the nearby tsunami center after the message sounded and determined for himself that there was no tsunami. He then got on the air and reported to the public that there was no tsunami threat.

A notable downside to all this: Listeners may be compelled to dismiss future warnings, Chmielewski told the paper.

“The danger, of course, is the system is designed to alert people,” he said. “If there are too many false alerts …”

The National Tsunami Warning Center said it is looking into why the test message was distributed over the EAS system as a warning and will provide more information as it becomes available.