The familiar tones of the emergency broadcast system should have drawn the attention of Connecticut residents to this message crawling across the bottom of television screens yesterday:
Civil authorities have issued an immediate evacuation order for all of Connecticut, beginning at 2:10 p.m. and ending at 3:10 p.m.
The evacuation order failed to set off a noticeable exodus into Massachusetts, Rhode Island or New York.
The Hartford Courant reports the only real emergency was at the state Office of Emergency Management in Hartford. An employee punched in the wrong code during the weekly test of the emergency broadcasting system.
It's pretty bad that there was a false alarm to evacuate the entire state. It's much worse that hardly anyone was aware of the "immediate evacuation order." No one I know in Connecticut was aware of the false alarm. I was in New York and was told about the false alarm by a colleague in the evening. The first news report I saw about the false report was posted on San Francisco's KRON TV's web site.
I'm sure the authorities will do whatever is necessary to avoid another false alarm. After all it's just too embarrassing. What the authorities should do, and I'm afraid they won't, is to revise the emergency broadcast system so that if there is ever a need to immediately evacuate "all of Connecticut," it actually gets everyone's attention.
How does anyone think it possible to evacuate the entire state. It seems hard enough just to get everyone to and from work on a normal work day. Then there is the weekend getaway. Try driving across Connecticut on I-95 any Friday afternoon or evening.
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