National Emergency Message

After the EOM is received, stations will return to normal programming in order to broadcast immediate news coverage of the event.

Formerly, stations would not resume broadcast until an Emergency Action Termination (SAME code: EAT) was issued.

The Office of Civil Defense originally created the term for the national emergency notification enactment.

[a][8] When an EAN was initially received, and during any time a new message was not available, an FCC mandated standby script was used (and repeated).

[10] Normal programming would not continue until the transmission of an Emergency Action Termination message (SAME code: EAT).

[9] A properly authenticated Emergency Action Notification was incorrectly sent to United States broadcast at 9:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on February 20, 1971.

[15] After 40 minutes and six incorrect or improperly formatted cancellation messages, the accidental activation was officially terminated.

On April 21, 1997, several television and radio stations in Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Ohio mistakenly received a false EAN.

[17][18] On October 24, 2014, Bobby Bones' syndicated radio program broadcast audio from the 2011 national test of the EAS (the only one that was coded as an EAN), during a segment where he ranted over his local Fox affiliate's scheduling of an EAS test during a World Series game.