[EAS] [BC] Guam: accidential Civil Danger Warning broadcast

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

There really doesn't seem to be a good answer to this... it's one of the baked-in problems with the SAME encoding that there's no concept of cancelling or retracting an erroneous alert.  As Sean noted, CAP does have a cancel mechanism, but that doesn't do much once the CAP message has been down-converted to SAME. 

 Still, the first step when you're in a hole is to stop digging, and in the case of an erroneous alert received from IPAWS a cancel would (should) at least inhibit any station that hasn't yet already sent the alert from doing so.  An erroneous alert originated in the analog system, though?  Not aware of any cure for that.

Probably the least-bad response would be to wake up the jurisdiction's PIOs and have them start dialing their media list and explaining.  And that, of course, depends on the jurisdiction's ability to detect and diagnose a system error that didn't go through their shop.

(Of course there are folks who'll assume that any mistake must have been made by government rather than the private sector, which might discourage the PIOs from wanting to put their fingerprints on the whole affair.  Again, there's no real good solution available under the current EAS framework.)

Art

PS, for any who don't remember the Granddaddy of all Falsies from 1971... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B1EAeh6H_I.   It's painful, but listen to the whole thing... the repudiation of the alert near the end is an example of what little can be done in such circumstances.