Emergency Broadcast for Amber Alert ?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Last night I was enjoying channel-surfing around 7 PM when the gut-clenching drone of the Emergency Broadcast System overrode the TV sound.

A banner appeared over the top of the screen, and a voice declared “The authorities have declared a Civil Emergency for this area. Turn to Channel [TWENTY FOUR] for more details”.

Oh, shit. Terrorist strike. Volcano eruption. Earthquake and tsunami.

I thought about the unfinished basket of bottled water and canned food in the laundry room, and the pistol and fire extinguisher I hadn’t tested in years.

Channel 24 had a bunch of garbled text on it, and the same voiceover. The image was still showing minutes of a City Council meeting.

When the text finally cleared into something readable, the banner disappeared from the other channels and Channel 24 told us that young Justin Quintero, age 8, and his infant brother Jonah Quintero, had been abducted by their own mother.

I read up on this one today; clearly the lady is unstable and suicidal and dangerous to herself. The police have pictures, names, license plate numbers, and a probably location.

This might be a great reason to put out an APB to the affected police departments.

But what the Alert last night didn’t mention is that this happened in Salem, Oregon. This emergency alert scared the crap out of me here in Seattle, WA.

I can’t figure out how a simple abduction 220 miles away turned into a civil emergency warning in a town that the suspect can’t get to for 4 hours.

I know that this Forum has discussed the utility of Amber Alerts before, but has anyone else seen one that escalated so that it used the Emergency Broadcast System ?

2

Yeah, once. The kid had gone missing from Baltimore (IIRC) and the Amber Alert went all up & down the East Coast.

3

Yeah, the same one you did. It confues me too, since the Amber alert had been one of the big stories on the news just a bit before that.
They did mention on the news that she might be coming to Seattle, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t coming to my house.
Usually, when I hear the alert tone, I turn the TV off, it hurts my ears.
I know its not warning me of an earthquake, or I’d be feeling it, and anything else, well, I 'll die or not, so why run around?

4

A couple of times. I’ll admit it’s annoying because (1) it’s often involving an area not particularly geographically close, (2) the information they provide is usually vague enough to be completely worthless, (3) it’s always happened at night, at which the odds of me leaving the house in the next 8-10 hours is virtually nil, and (4) they blank out the entire screen when they don’t need to. A running bar on the bottom of the screen would be better. At this point, it’s too tempting to just change the channel, which I’m sure is exactly what they don’t want you to do. Leave the EB signal for actual Emergencies.

5

This is the exact thing that will stop people from paying attention to the emergency alert system (formally EBS).