False Alarm from Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre

Thursday morning I noticed a worrying message from the Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre:

Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 03:29:03 +0530 ...

"IOTWMS-TSP INDIA has detected an earthquake with the following preliminary information:

Magnitude  : 8.5  M
Depth      : 10  km                      
Date       : 20 JUN 2018
Origin Time: 2154UTC

... this earthquake may be capable of generating a tsunami affecting the Indian Ocean region."

This was alarming because an 8.5 magnitude earthquake is extremely large. But then I noticed the location was given as "TEST_TEST_CENTRAL CHILE".

As confirmed later, this was a test message which escaped from the internal system, out to the public:

"CANCELLATION MESSAGE ...
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 05:33:31 +0530

IOTWMS TSUNAMI SERVICE PROVIDER INDIA (ITEWC)

This is not a real event. This event was issued due to an operator error during an internal test. ..."

It took two hours to issue the correction, which is an unacceptably long time.

Review of Australian Fire Alert System

In "Analysis: Fire alert system overhaul could boost awareness" Andrew O'Connor\ (ABC, 16 January 2016), wrote that current Australian bushfire alerts  "... make the task of quickly building accurate situational awareness difficult and vulnerable to misperception and misunderstanding". There is a very large body of research on communication of emergency public warnings (with about 7,000 papers in 2015). The advent of the Internet and the web has aided this, not only by providing another method of communicating warnings, but providing a new avenue for understanding how people understand messages.