Shobia Brooks was watching a clip of the devastation in Haiti on Thursday afternoon when an alert from the National Weather Service flashed across her television screen in bright red letters.
The Tampa Bay area, the message read, was under an earthquake warning.
"It said to be prepared," said Brooks, 58. "It put me in a panic attack."
The tickertape scrawl about the tremors turned out to be a test that only meteorologists should have seen.
"We test it all the time," said Dan Noah of the National Weather Service in Ruskin, "but it usually isn't broadcast to the rest of the world. This one made it out of the building."
Almost immediately, all the phone lines at the weather service and Hillsborough County Emergency Management lit up with concerned callers, officials said.
"We got a few" calls, emergency management spokeswoman Holley Wade said with a laugh.
Noah said that on the radio, the warning was spoken by an automated voice that repeated, "Test, earthquake warning, test." The alert was broadcast at 1:07 p.m.
Computer engineers are still trying to figure out how the glitch happened.
"Our No. 1 mission is to warn of hazardous weather to protect life and property," Noah said. "We have to make sure the system works."
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