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.

Almost as easy as switching off the alert so it never bothers you.

Its not going to fuck up your phone. You literally click on OK and it goes away. There us a video example in the link OP gave.

This is me too
I'm anxious as to how this siren is going to sound. I'm going to be on edge all day when it's test day.

Well exactly? Sorry but I don’t get what you’re trying to say. My point was you only need to press an okay button to switch off the alert so it’s unlikely it would “fuck up” anyones phone 🙄

you’re phone could run out of battery if someone kept trying to ring / text you whilst in the locker too - what are you gonna do, block everyone? Even if your phone is on silent it’ll still light up for most phones, whataboutery isn’t a clever move. I never said anything about not turning the alert off, so idk why you’re being weird towards me about it.

I sometimes wonder how our society would cope faced what that generation had to put up with.

Christ, not this again, we heard enough of that during the pandemic 🙄

*your 🤦‍♀️

My mobile phone will be turned off on 23 April then. Note it's a Sunday and just before local elections, and incidentally when there will be 80,000 people at Wembley Stadium in the afternoon.

I'll let nearest and dearest know so if they need to call me, it will be on the landline. Not everyone has that option though.

Puddles My apologies

this stuff makes me really tetchy but I shouldn't have taken it out on you. I'm sorry.

Have you disabled the alert? I can't really have my phone off for that long because of my elderly mum.

Exactly - it’s works well but as you can see on this thread, people are planning on disabling it. Very useful system when there is a flooding or missing person - too many selfish people here who wouldn’t be prepared to help others.

There's no need to switch your phone off all day. It won't start until early evening on April 23 and it'll last all of ten seconds.

I signed up to the local town version of this when I lived in the US. Not as sophisticated as it just sends out to the numbers on the list, it’s not by location and you have to put your number on the list.

The only 2 times it alerted me was when there was a bad accident on a major road nearby and when there was an active shooter being chased by the police in our boring suburban neighbourhood. I was in the garden with my kids on a weekend afternoon. A text with a loud annoying noise saying go in your house immediately and lock your doors definitely got my attention! I then phoned my neighbours and friends to pass it on.

We also had the alerts for tornados and severe weather and for missing children. It did make you jump but it didn’t go on and on and on til you switched it off. It was like a text with a funny loud sound. It stopped after the initial sound and the message showed up in your notifications.

@Parker231 Getting a sense of deja vu from your posts I wonder why. 🤔

I've lived in a couple of places with this type of system. I have no idea why the UK does not already have a similar system in place.

It is used in a very, very limited way. Examples have been given already that may affect the UK: large, chemical fires with dangerous fumes; sudden and severe flooding; armed man etc. All those alerts were set off only in the local limited area and included the appropriate action recipients should take. I have not lived anywhere were they are used for missing persons.

The alarms are generally very loud. It is not an issue the phone suddenly going off in inappropriate places as everyone's phone will be doing the same. Personally, I'm happy to know that my window needs to be closed so we aren't suffering the effects of chemical inhalation.

As I said, I'm sure they've already got sound disabled on their secret phone in every possible way

If you click the link in the OP it will.take you to the government page which has a video example of the alert and you can hear what it sounds like.

Eventually, they will set them up to override mute
coming soon, like all the other stuff, I'm sure.

Thank you for that
It's higher pitched than I expected. Not especially jarring.

They played it on the BBC news this morning. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about it as April progresses.

You can listen to it here

Didn’t we get one during lockdown?
my phone in the states used to go off frequently for missing children and weather events like tornados.

in NZ we got tsunami warnings etc as well.

in Amsterdam a siren is tested monthly.

none of it is stressful because you know about it and the rest is allowing you to look at the news and see what’s going on.

sounds good to me

@MeinKraft No there isn't. Anything that was built during the cold war has been demolished or would be largely unusable.

I have that type of app on my phone. It's gone off once in the past three years,...which was a widely publicised drill at a particular time. It works in conjunction with our emergency sirens, some of which are out of date and not working properly anymore. They tested it to see how effective it was...and only about 50% of people received the warning on their phone. So I guess they have to sort that out now.
I think it's a good idea to have. The bloody sirens going off (testing) every so often freaks me out much more.

Firstly it will induce panic leading to roadrage, traffic jams, looting. Secondly most of these things are only going to affect a small proportion of the UK population due to geography. Thirdly they haven't issued any guidance on what to do if it's a nuclear threat for example. Back to point 1.

This is a joke, yeah?

No, why would it be?
I'm autistic and don't like loud and sudden sounds.
It's in the username