If your area was flooded, did your phone get an emergency alert?

[Shyandhiding]

I haven’t heard anyone say they got one, but isn’t this what it was for?

Mine are switched off, but as I said at the time this was discussed on here; we knew about the risks from mainstream media anyway.

The met office provided the warnings and the very single news outlet known to man shared it.

We had council workers etc going door to door trying to evacuate people from a local town before it flooded.

I do not see how an alert from the government would have made much of a difference tbh

Our area was hit hard but I don't know of anyone that got an alert (East Anglia)

Good point. No.

I know a lot of people who were flooded, a significant amount of our local area was under water and not one person got an alert. Which is bloody ridiculous as it's the first example listed on the emergency alert page explaining it's purpose.

I wonder if it's actually been used since the test anywhere? I suspect not and it's just another waste of money.

That is really ridiculous. What was the point of it all!

No. No phone alert here.

I really have no idea. It seems completely pointless having it at all if it's not going to be used for the purpose they claimed it would be used for as claimed in the screenshot of the website.

I also had a quick Google and apparently it's estimated to cost approximately £25 MILLION for just the first 3 years!! So a humongous waste of money if it's not actually doing what it claimed it would do.

No alerts here

The issue with flooding is that it is very localised. The mobile phone alert can only be restricted to a certain mast - if everyone in that sector got an evacuate message it would potentially clog up street's further away from the danger zone so those on most immediate harm can't get away. There are exceptions eg a dam likely to burst but in most cases flooding will be restricted to a handful of houses, a few streets at most not most of a town

Because it's not many houses, it's officials go house to house, they can then organise help if necessary

I'm still waiting for the test one...

That depends though doesn't it. In some of the areas I know which were flooded it absolutely wasn't just not many houses where people could go house to house to help, it was several hundreds of houses, community buildings, shops and stables etc.

No alert here and pretty bad floods, however I wonder if the emergency alerts would be more suitable for significant threat to life. The North Sea flood killed over 500 people in the UK. The Sheffield dam disaster (1800s) killed nearly 300 (though not sure an emergency alert would have been quick enough). A few other floods in recent (ish) history where thousands have lost homes and dozens have died. I'm not sure the floods last week quite warranted evacuation or mass texts being sent out.

Because it’s only going to be used for a nuclear threat.

In Brechin, 350 homes were given notice to evacuate before the river breached the flood barrier.

I can't imagine door to door contact would be faster than a much-publicised emergency text service. Going door to door should only complement a faster alert, not be a primary means of communication.

Evacuation was warranted and did happen in Scotland when it became clear that hundreds of homes were going to be flooded.

And while the emergency text service was originally tested nationally, it doesn't have to be delivered on a mass scale. It can be delivered locally, or at least we were told it can be when they were seeking to justify having spent millions of pounds on it.

I read that 400 homes were evacuated. It could be more now I have no idea. Could an emergency alert be that localised? Genuine question.

If there's a nuclear threat what good is a bloody emergency alert going to be...

i like a previous poster was under the illusion it could be localised, surely if that's not the case then there is little to no use having the system in the first place.

I haven't read the full thread but please consider signing up for floodline https://www.sepa.org.uk/environment/water/flooding/floodline/ which provides flood alerts and warnings (this link is for Scotland) but there is similar provision for England and probably the rest of the UK

It’s for when the aliens invade.

Obvs.

Or the Zombies!