Phone Alarms

[Ineke]

Recently listened to the radio about Government goings on during early stages of the pandemic how we mere mortals would have the pants scared off us if we were told such and such. Then, a later bulletin about the new nationwide alarm sound that will be able to be sent to all smart phones, as a warning if for instance, extreme heat is expected. Would have thought that a weather forecast could have told us that. AIBU to think that it could possibly be more serious extreme heat the powers that be are preparing for such as early warning for some sort of missile attack. The world is in an unstable place right now and I don’t trust our Governments with anything they choose to tell or not tell us. Am I just paranoid.

I presume it is just contingency for anything that might be considered to be 'an emergency'

More people don't follow weather reports, or even check in daily with News reports, than those that do.

Our City Council has had this contingency planning in place for YEARS. Probably decades. I imagine the National Government has too - they are just updating it.

They will probably target specific regions - so can let people have updates when power is off in one region after a storm, for example, or issue flood warnings for those potentially likely to be affected.

I'd say you are being paranoid.

You are probably a bit paranoid......there is no need to give us early warning of a missile attack.....you can run but you can't hide....... (do you remember the advice to hide under the stairs in the event of a nuclear bomb? "Where the wind blows" and all that!!)
I'm just wondering what time they will test this thing.....too early and it will disturb Sunday lay ins. Too late and the church services will be interesting!! And don't they dare save it till the evening when the little kids are just asleep.

I'm not in favour of this. As you say we have enough media already to push messages out.

What if your phones on silent?

I won't know til hours later

It overrides the silent setting so will alarm anyway.

I don't like the idea of this. Surely you can opt out?

Well, my Facebook yesterday was full of people posting the fake govt phone alarm that we are at war with Russia.
The only problem I see with this kind of alarm from the govt is the above. The fakesters with an agenda are going to fake shit, the gullible are going to believe it.

1. This was announced in May 2021 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine so nothing to do with that
2. Yes you can opt out in your settings, but you better hope that you don’t miss something that means emergency services have to put their lives in danger to rescue you.
3. It over rides the silent mode on your phone.
4. Many other countries have this system and there’s nothing but praise for it.

I'll be pissed off if I've just got the kids to sleep and it goes off!

I don't know why they can't just send a pop up notification or a text like they did with covid

Agree though that MN itself will implode (pun intended) if they test it.
Because nobody gets up at the weekend before about 11, no child under the age of 17 is awake after 7.30pm unless they're up all night because their parents daren't send them to bed.
And what if, shock, somebody's neighbour knocks on the door during the alarm? Or an Amazon parcel arrives? These 2 catastrophic events are already worthy of entire threads so god knows what will happen if the 4 minute warning pings on your phone at the same time. They'll all be blown to glory because instead of sitting under the stairs they'll be starting a thread complaining.

<light-hearted> 🙄

Some of the alarms will be for 'take action now' eg if your area is about to flood. Or there could be the need to evacuate or shelter due to a gas leak or chemical release or any other 'emergency' reason.

I work in emergency planning. Preparing for and rehearsing emergencies, big and small, some of which may even never happen (hopefully) is a whole industry and a full time job for a lot of people.

If/when anything happens, it will be necessary to alert the public, in the past this would have been by local radio or TV, and it probably still will be, but now that smartphones are almost ubiquitous, sending alerts to them is by far the most effective way to reach a lot of people very quickly and they can also target people in particular areas using the cell towers, or with prepopulated distribution lists, eg people who live near nuclear power stations (there are regulations that require people who live within a certain radius to be pre informed about the actions they would need to take in the event of an accident).

It's not sinister, nothing to do with imminent missile attacks, just the UK catching up with systems that have been in place in other countries for years.

Remember all the times you’ve seen “what’s the government going to do about it ?” well this is for all the many people that need the state to nurse them throughout their lifetime.

Presumably it’s very similar to the thing in the USA where everyone in the vicinity gets an alert if a child goes missing. Those really freaked us out the first time we got one!

Weather events are emergencies. The flooding in Germany last year was supposed to send an emergency notification but it didn't work, they reckon around 60 lives could have been saved if the emergency notification had been deployed.

Basically the danger wasn't apparent to people in the village until it was too late.

We've always has weather events.