Emergency Broadcasts

None of that is surprising in the context of proper independent ITV regions, each with a proper fully staffed pres department.

A rather rare Emergency Alert System announcement from 1999/2000:

Speaking of rare EAS announcements, I've never seen one like this before. It was issued by a local police department after news came of an impending tornado. Not quite sure of the technicalities, but it seems they were able to break into the transmission using telephone numbers, talk over the broadcast, and deactivate the alert by keying another code on the telephone. The alert itself is nothing more than a flickering white screen and some rather unpleasant warning sounds.

Sounds a lot like how radio traffic news used to have DTMF tones before and after to activate the RDS encoder at the transmitter site.

Could that have been an emergency broadcast into a radio station that got taken by TV? I think that's how it works in some areas.

I think some still do have the tones, or they did until very recently.

Some have the tones but I think they're more for effect now rather than for signalling to the RDS kit, there are much more sophisticated ways of doing that now.

This alert seems very similar to this one, broadcast erroneously on the Nickelodeon Channel by the 18th Wing Command Post on the 20 June 2002:



Also, let's not forget the time when somebody dialed into a local cable network but forgot to dial out, leaving viewers with a black screen and telephone noises:

To go back to the original question - to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a system in place for emergency broadcasts, and it would be up to each individual broadcaster to do their own thing. In theory, each coding & multiplex (or uplink) operator could pick up a source from somewhere like BT Tower and switch it to all their TX chains, but I don't think the government have their own studio from which to make announcements.

The big broadcasters will all have their own plans, generally involving uplinks to Astra 2 in diverse locations, at least one of which will be out of London.

And there's the *ahem* top secret BBC Radio facility which goes down a few floors...

I would be very surprised if there is a "studio" as such.

I always thought in the American setup the White House is (or can very quickly become) a studio for the duration of the announcement, as to believe otherwise defeats the whole point of the EAS. As we don't have such a system here (or if we do it's undocumented) it's probably safe to assume that wouldn't happen here.

Presumably any major announcement for any major emergency over here will come to us through the BBC through a News Update/Interruption as the state broadcaster, and delivered by somebody of suitable status on behalf of the government. The sequence of events on the main channels and the messages everybody else put up on their networks redirecting their viewers after the death of Diana in 1997 is probably a good base line to start off should anything more serious need reporting.

It's not quite the same as your White House example but I believe that it's reasonably trivial to get a simple live one camera OB from Downing Street on the air. There are permanent circuits to the BBC so it can be done at a moment's notice if that infrastructure hasn't been affected by whatever the emergency is.

In Cold War days there was a network of bunkers around the country. The more important of these contained a basic BBC radio studio with lines to the local radio stations in the area and also to the main transmitters.

It seems the idea was a belt and braces job with the idea of cobbling something together from whatever infrastructure was left.

*BUZZ* - the BBC is *not* the state broadcaster, we don't have one in this country. The main public broadcaster, the national broadcaster, those are a couple of possible ways to refer to it. One thing it's definitely not is a state broadcaster.

Well, it is owned by the state, albeit not controlled by the government in power. "State-owned" would be an acceptable term.