Company, feds trade blame for bogus tsunami warning

A private forecasting company took what was intended to be a routine National Weather Service test message and sent it to subscribers’ phones as an official tsunami warning Tuesday morning, the latest in a spate of false alarms since last month.

AccuWeather blamed the National Weather Service for the false alarm, saying the government weather agency “miscoded” a test message as a real warning. The weather service rejected the claim. The back-and-forth only added to the confusion about why and how AccuWeather customers throughout the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean wound up with a tsunami warning that wasn’t real.