About 15 minutes ago, I was listening to Morning Edition on WBEZ with half an ear as I attempt to awaken fully and get going (I don’t have to be at work for more than an hour, I generally leave about 40 minutes from now).

And OOPS! There it goes again!! WBEZ got knocked off the air a second time mid-sentence, and has been replaced by a shifting soundscape of radio noise, some in Spanish, some in Russian, bits of music, and now the EAS tones agian. Unfortunately, David took the digital recorder to work with him, and mylaptop does not have recording software…yet.

WBEZ is back on the air, where the announcer sounds mighty relieved. This is sure messing up their summer end-of-fiscal-year pledge drive. And for the record, we’re fall-drive pledgers, because otherwise we get two sets of totchkes, and two subscriptions of Newsweek, so it doesn’t really pay.

And there’s the second apology of the morning, and the announcer says it’s happening at a lot of a lot of radio stations in the area. This time, it only lasted about a minute or so – last time, it shifted around for a while and then WGN AM720 came in fairly clearly, with commercials, traffic and sports reports, and two very clear station-identification announcements. I googled around and found that WGN is the main radio station for the EAS/Emergency Alert System for the area.

WILL COUNTY
Each area is served by 2 local primary stations, which will forward National and State EAS messages. The LP-1 for area six is WGN AM 720, and the LP-2 is WBBM AM 780. An additional station, WLS AM 890 is a primary entry point (PEP) station. The PEP can be directly activated by the White House in the event of a national emergency.

Somebody somewhere keeps activating EAS area-wide, which is a very big, huge deal. It’s activated fairly frequently here for severe weather, so people tend to sit up and listen when it’s activated in relatively good weather without the reassuring “this is a test,” which was omitted (and indeed, they broke in mid-sentence, if not mid-word).

That was quite freaky the first time – David was still here and he paused to see what the announcement would be – after listening to broadcast noise and then hearing another radio station come in with an announcer saying “well, we’ll try to figure out what that buzzing noise is” before going to commercial, David wondered whether it was a pirate signal of some kind (Chicago is kind of famous for it). And in that previous incident, WGN-TV was the victim.

I wonder if anybody is screwing around on top of Sears Tower again? That was the common feature in the Max Headroom pirate video incident in the 70’s.

Either that, or somebody at WGN is not owning up to the Coke they spilled on the control board…

Pledge break is back on… we could use another EAS break-in about now, which is infinitely more interesting. I’m sure there will be news items on this later, sorry I couldn’t record it for your listening pleasure.

UPDATE:The explanation per the Trib:

If you were listening to the radio or watching television this morning, you might have been confused by what appeared to be an emergency alert.

Numerous local stations were interrupted around 7:45 a.m. by what seemed to be an announcement from the Emergency Alert System. There was no indication it was a test message, and on-air hosts such as WGN-AM 720’s Spike O’Dell were as surprised as listeners were.

“This is Spike at WGN,” O’Dell said on the air after the station had gone silent for more than 2 minutes. “We are trying to figure out what’s going on.”

Officials said the problem originated at the federal level.

On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency installed a new satellite warning system for Illinois as part of a program set for all 50 states, Illinois Emergency Management Agency director Andrew Velasquez III said in a news release.

He said FEMA conducted a test of the new system this morning, but rather than sending an internal test message the signal was mistakenly sent out to broadcast stations.

“We don’t know why the federal government used a ‘hot’ or active code rather than a test code when they sent out this test message,” Velasquez said.

It sure sounded weird – but I doubt it was anything more than a screwed up test. Our incompetent FEMA/TSA political appointees triumph again.