Orange County Residents Stunned When TV Programming Interrupted With ‘End Of The World’ PSA
Stacy Laflamme of Lake Forest said she was watching the HGTV channel via
Cox Communications about 11:05 a.m. when suddenly an emergency alert
flashed across her screen followed by a voice. “Realize this, extremely
violent times will come,” a man’s voice boomed, according to a video of
the alert. Laflamme said she was alarmed. “It almost sounded like
Hitler talking,” she said. “It sounded like a radio broadcast coming
through the television.” In addition to Cox, Spectrum cable customers
in Orange County received the alert.
Stacy Laflamme of Lake Forest said she was watching the HGTV channel via Cox Communications about 11:05 a.m. when suddenly an emergency alert flashed across her screen followed by a voice.
“Realize this, extremely violent times will come,” a man’s voice boomed, according to a video of the alert. Laflamme said she was alarmed.“It almost sounded like Hitler talking,” she said. “It sounded like a radio broadcast coming through the television.” In addition to Cox, Spectrum cable customers in Orange County received the alert.
Erin Mireles of Diamond Bar was watching the Bravo channel on Spectrum’s cable system when her show was interrupted by the alert.
“I was definitely startled, ’cause the volume increased exponentially,” she said. “I wasn’t alarmed in the sense of thinking something was wrong, ’cause I assumed it was some sort of hack. My channel changed back to Bravo after a couple minutes.”The mysterious alert became a hot topic on social media.
The problem occurred because of one or more radio stations conducting an emergency test, Joe Camero, a spokesman for Cox, said Thursday. Cable systems pick up such alerts, and viewers should have seen just a typical emergency-broadcast test.
“With these tests, an emergency tone is sent out to initiate the test,” Camero said. “After the tone is transmitted, another tone is sent to end the message. It appears that the radio station (or stations) did not transmit the end tone to complete the test.”
Then the broadcast picked up some audio feed that bleed into the alert. Camero said Cox technicians shut down the emergency test as soon as they became aware of the problem.
“We don’t want to alarm anyone with any false emergency alerts,” he said.
