Your Emergency alerts in the Pensacola area last evening and today were worthless and uninformative they provided no actionable information. They may be required so you could at least make them informative and useful. Last evenings message merely stated an adjoining county has issued a warning or alert, no details were provided.
EAS messages have nothing to do with Cox. EAS messages originate from the gov't to select radio stations. The select stations will initially broadcast it, other stations will receive and re-transmit and onward it goes via a daisy-chain of stations.
Local TV stations are part of the daisy-chain. The FCC requires local affiliates to at least play the audio portion but they can create whatever you see on TV.
Cox wouldn't even know there's an EAS message unless they're watching TV. If Cox did originate it, you should assured they'd advertise on it: "...bought to you by Cox..." with their logo.
My cable box will not output 5.1 Dolby sound after these alerts. The only way I have found to get the sound back to normal is to power cycle the DVR.
were they real or the test ones?
