More than ‘only a test’

If you had your radio or TV tuned in Monday morning at a little after 10 a.m., you probably got an earful of Republican politics before returning to your “regularly scheduled programming.”

A glitch in the Emergency Alert System’s monthly test left many listeners and viewers perplexed—and some of them angry. A political ad for U.S. Senate hopeful Dick Mountjoy blasted Dianne Feinstein’s views on illegal immigrants. It was followed by a mortgage-company commercial.

A Sacramento radio station, KFBK 1530 AM, is responsible for sending the Emergency Alert System announcements to all the other stations in the area. Its signal goes out until terminated—in this case, after the station’s regularly programmed advertisements had already begun airing.

Lori Eckman, who was watching her Comcast cable Monday morning in Oroville, was furious about the Mountjoy ad. “Something has to be done,” she said.

Rumblings of political conspiracies and hacking the system can be put to bed, though. The station is taking the blame.

“It was operator error,” said Zachary Rukstela, engineer for Clear Channel Communications, which runs KFBK. “The situation has been remedied. The operator was unclear on how to operate the equipment properly. We’ve retrained that person, and they understand how to operate that equipment.”

Larry Scott, operations manager and program director at Deer Creek Broadcasting, which operates radio stations in Chico, said they noticed the alert was going longer than planned and tried to stop it.

“We were trying to defeat their signal, but normally in a case like that until they send the tone to end the message, we just pretty much stay with them,” Scott said. “[KFBK is] the primary station in this area. It’s their monthly Emergency Alert System test. We just relay it.”