Emergency alerts to your phone

[TheFirstOfHerName]

From April, the government will be able to send emergency alerts to our mobile phones.

www.gov.uk/alerts

A siren will go off, even if your phone is on silent. You won't be able to do anything else on your phone until you turn it off. They plan to test this on 23 April.

I understand the reasons why this can be helpful, and in areas where people need to suddenly evacuate due to wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes etc it could save lives.

However, personally I don't want it, and have disabled it on my phone.

1. Of the emergencies I might experience, I'm not sure I'd want to be alerted to any of them via this method. If a flood or storm is imminent, I'll find out through the usual channels. If a nuclear missile is heading my way, having a few minutes' warning will not help.

1. This system is being run / overseen by the UK government, and my trust in them has been somewhat eroded over the past few years.

1. I have an anxiety disorder (reasonably well managed with combination of medication and other methods) and I think the cost to my anxiety levels of having my phone suddenly sirenning at me outweighs the negligible probability of this system saving my life.

If you are the kind of calm, resilient person who could have these alarms going off and it not completely throw you, then great.

Depends how they define emergency- if it’s genuinely every few years to alert to something on the scale of a tsunami or a significant terror attack like the London bombings then ok I can see how that could be useful.

The first time they use it for nonsense like missing people, amber weather warnings etc and I’ll turn it off permanently.

Thanks OP, found it now on Settings ‐> Emergency Alerts -> Wireless Alerts. New Samsung is anyone's interested, I know someone posted upthread about Samsungs.

Until about 10 years ago the flood warnings at the coast used to be given using the old air raid sirens. That used to make everyone jump, particularly those that lived through the war but everyone managed to get on with their day afterwards, this really is no different.

I live in SE England. My DH has already had 3 alerts in the past few months. I've been sitting next to him each time, yet my phone had no such alert!

I can only assume they chose random numbers to trial it on- yet never bothered to tell him. It was quite scary the 1st time- like something out of a film.

I live in a country that has those warnings.

mostly they are tests, but we had them at the start of the various covid lockdowns and during the storms last year where a few streets needed to be urgently evacuated due to damage.

It will be in your phone settings. On my samsung it is under emergency and safety

I had to sign up to get flood alerts from SEPA over my phone, my garden backed on to a river so obviously was a huge flood risk and one of the few companies that would insure my house made it a condition of my policy. Fine, except I got an emergency flood alert every time it rained for more than ten minutes and my house never came close to flooding.

As long as it’s used correctly, for major emergencies in the relevant area, then it’s a great idea. If I’m getting weather warning for the south of England when I’m in the west of Scotland then people will completely ignore the one message they need to take notice of.

My first thought was I wonder what time of day they'll run that test. Imagine being at a funeral where you've all put your phone on silent and the alarm still sounds!
My 2nd thought was what sort of panic and chaos would ensue if the alert went off notifying people there was a terror threat in their vicinity?

This is the UK, where people rang 999 because KFC was out of chicken. Thankfully real national crisis situations are rare!

@TheFirstOfHerName pay no attention!

The more threads the merrier!!

I had actually seen it on the BBC news, I was looking out for a flurry of threads on it, but hadn't seen any at all.

it's important to let people know, so they're prepared. I'd turn it off on my Elderly Aunts phone, but she only turns ut on when she wants to use it 😂

The report on bbc news says early evening 23rd April which is a Sunday

I’m fine with it as long as it’s only used in an emergency

ie I don’t want good government bullshit pushed to my phone

Gives people time to get their make up done and phone out to record it all on tiktok

I can’t see the benefit to opting out imo. This is for a true emergency, you are going to be getting notifications every time a tree has blown over.

It depends when they send them out. I really don't want a siren going off on my phone in the middle of the night because someone is missing! I don't mind getting the alerts as texts, I just don't want the sound.

I'll keep an eye on MN on the evening of Sunday 23rd April for the flood of 'I found out my husband has a second phone when the emergency alert went off' and 'There's a siren going off in the house somewhere' posts, then - it'll be a combination of ducks, LTBs, Cherchez la Femme and 'we had this with an old CO2 alarm in 1997'.

Sorry if this is a dense question but for people who already have these systems, does it go on the address the phone is registered to or the location the phone is actually at? So if you had a flood or fire in Colorado, say, but you were on holiday in Florida would it still ping you?

Jesus

The government guidance for the UK specifies that it is based on your location at the moment the alert goes out, not where you live or where your phone is registered.

@NeverDropYourMooncup

yep!! My first thought was the MN posts about 'secret phones' being 'outed'!!

it will take then so long to get an alert approved/agreed on, the danger will have passed & we'll be almost finished the clean up process!!

Ohhh interesting. I've had a siren go off on my phone three times recently. Very annoying. I managed to turn it off. I thought I'd rung 999 by accident (because of course they'd play a siren at me 🙈) . Scared the shite out of me.

I agree. It wouldn't be so bad during the day (although I don't particularly want a siren going off) but I don't need to be woken up during the night. It's not as though I'm going to get up and do anything! The option of a text message would be fine.

What about the vast swathes of the country that don't yet have a reliable phone network? I live in Somerset and have absolutely no signal in my house or work (as my screenshot of the criteria can attest to) and can only pick up one or two bars of 3G around the village and surrounding area. I'm on Tesco which is carried by O2. DH is on Vodafone and he's the same.

Another one living in a country where we have them. I had two last year, one for a missing child who was found in a car being kidnapped, and one for flash flooding which was actually very useful. Odd experience being in public when everyone’s phones alert at the same time! I think they’re very useful.

If there's an emergency situation that it would be helpful to be aware of, I'd rather know about it than not know.

I'm happy to receive alerts. It seems like a good idea to me, as long as it's used in a sensible manner.