Another False Alert: There Is No Tsunami Headed to New York

• February 06 2018
• Todd Shields

A tsunami warning was erroneously sent to East Coast mobile phones Tuesday as lawmakers in Washington gathered to look into emergency alert problems, including last month’s false notification of a missile attack in Hawaii.

A tsunami warning was erroneously sent to East Coast mobile phones Tuesday as lawmakers in Washington gathered to look into emergency alert problems, including last month’s false notification of a missile attack in Hawaii.

The National Weather Service’s National Tsunami Warning Center issued a routine test message around 8:30 a.m., and the message was released by “at least one private sector company” as an official tsunami warning, Susan Buchanan, spokeswoman for the weather service said in an email. She didn’t identify the company.

The failure resulted “in widespread reports of tsunami warnings received via phones and other media across the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean,” Buchanan said.

Soon after Tuesday’s false alert the weather service’s Twitter account for New York City posted a message saying, “***THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING***”.

Lawmakers said such incidents, including Hawaii’s Jan. 13 false alarm, could erode public confidence in the warning system, causing people to ignore the messages.

“Unfortunately, there have been erroneous emergency alerts sent to the public. That undermines the confidence in the system,” Representative Dan Donovan, a New York Republican, said at a congressional hearing. “We saw an example of this just this morning.”

Donovan, the chairman of the House Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications Subcommittee, asked if training or procedures need to be improved.

The wireless emergency alert system was launched in 2012, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Authorized national, state or local government authorities may use it to send alerts regarding public safety emergencies. Participating wireless carriers push the alerts to mobile devices in the affected area.

"For the public alerts and the warnings to be effective, the public has to be able to trust them,” said Representative Donald Payne Jr., a New Jersey Democrat. “False alerting can be very dangerous as it can lead to alert apathy, confusion and unnecessary panic.”

In the Hawaii incident, a state worker mistakenly believed a ballistic missile attack was under way, federal regulators said last week. Residents anxious about months of nuclear saber-rattling between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un were sent into a panic. The Federal Communications Commission’s investigation is ongoing.