What just happened?

     At 1:18 p.m. Wednesday, I heard my wife's phone sound downstairs then, a moment later, mine buzzed.
     The national alert we had been told about. I'd noticed online reports about nutbag conspiracy theories — that the alert will somehow activate "nanoparticles" in people's bloodstream, injected along with the COVID vaccine, causing Marburg virus to manifest itself. Crazy stuff; hard for me to believe anybody believes that. But apparently some do, unless it's somebody's plea for attention.

     For me, the alert evoked memories of that  horrendous grating noise they used to play periodically over the radio as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

     I always wondered why the tone had to sound so awful, like Satan clearing his throat. Why couldn't it be something neutral, a gong, say, or even soothing. A harp glissando. With a disaster potentially bearing down on us; isn't comfort in order?

     I read the message, took a screenshot, and wondered two things:
     First, what conceivable emergency would require the entire nation to be notified at once? The United States is almost 2,900 miles across at its widest point. No weather, no natural disaster affects more than a part of it. Any attack would be localized. So what are we practicing for? 
     Reading up, I quickly realized that though the test is nationwide, the alerts are typically used in one region or another, to alert an area to an advancing hurricane or raging wildfire. There are practical applications to this, not merely improbable doomsday scenarios.

     You have to wonder what the practical result of ringings tens of millions of phones — I wonder how many car accidents resulted, for instance.
     Leading to my second question: how do they alert everyone at once? By what process? Turns out to be quite complicated. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has a system it calls Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS. 
   They explain it this way:

     IPAWS allows Alerting Authorities to write their own message using commercially available software that is Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) compliant. The message is then delivered to the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS OPEN), where it is authenticated and then delivered simultaneously through multiple communication pathways. Through IPAWS, one message is created to reach as many people as possible to save lives and protect property.

     That's heavy sledding — as best I can figure it is, the government sends service providers a signal, and then every cell tower in their network scattershots out a pre-ordained message to every phone on the system. There is a chart that may or may not help.

    It's sort of an amazing thing, even if you only hazily understand the process — count me among you. Even for those of us muddy on the system, I think it's important to always ask, to make an effort to understand how a particular thing happens. Otherwise, we get into the habit of not bothering to even try to wrap our heads around a system, and risk shrugging off our technology as unknowable magic.