Alert for storm darragh

[Mugcake]

Did anyone else's phone get an alert for the storm? Scared the life out of me! I guess they've finally got it up and running

Was on phone to a friend both in London, she got alert i didnt.

Yeah,. maybe you shouldn't?

😆

I was out in a restaurant in Bristol, for a works do, and the whole place erupted with sirens. I was just about to jump up and flag a cab down, so I could at least be with my family when the bombs started falling (who wants to die, or be in a post-apocolyptic dystopia with Sherl, and Dave from accounts?). Then I realised the sirens and danger warnings, were about a bit of wind...

You could still look out the window though - with wind this high, most people would notice something was amiss.

I reckon they wanted to try it out. The met office warning had been issued 9 hours earlier so news outlets and even my Alexa reported it. It scared many of my elderly congregation, I've been fielding messages from them all evening scared, they were even asking if they needed to go to a shelter! Perhaps the messages need to be tightened a bit, shorter and very clearly stay at home, it was in there but in a long message it gets lost, remember they can't necessarily remember the day of the week these days . I have to smile because it's pretty upsetting seeing them deteriorating, we instead make light of it.

Slightly disconcerted that my cat is on high alert and keeps using me as a trampoline to peer out of the window between fits of the zoomies.

I decided to go lock the bins in the shed before heading to bed and my cats decided to run out. Rain has stopped here - I think we're in the 'dead centre' - and I haven't got a mission of getting them back in.

Just had our third red alert of the evening and it's woken everyone up. One at 7pm, one at 11.55pm and one just a couple of minutes ago. Now we're all anxiously lying in the dark listening to the wind whipping around the house and wondering what we're supposed to do. Crouch under the stairs? Get into the non-existent basement, or just try and go back to sleep? Does more alerts mean more danger or just that someone at Alert HQ pressed the button by accident?

That's mad @Pluvia. Going to be a lot of people cross with the govt for ripping the arse out of this.

We were at the theatre, thankfully before the show started. So weird to have hundreds of phones and watches suddenly all make the siren noise - very unsettling.

I swiped at it to stop the noise then couldn’t find it to read it. Where does it go??

The bit I saw was “not safe to drive” but I missed the from 3am bit - so we were in a flap, looking at hotels due to being 50 miles from home with a big river crossing on an exposed bridge.

The message was way too long so important info was missed by most people who needed the noise to stop, then couldn’t find it to read.

The winds already pretty bad here and am in the East Midlands which is only a yellow warning, stay safe everyone!

Red alert here in N.Som …… amber alerts don’t get the siren as we’ve had them regularly with no siren. Seafront all closed off and flood defences up.

Would not risk driving on the m5 for anyone considering it.

Wind is picking up here, I'm in London. Really very loud.

We have a similar system in Canada. It was used when 72,000 of us had to evacuate for a wildfire. There are folks with PTSD who get really badly affected every time it has been used or tested ever since.

The torrential rain that was on all day here has stopped and it is calm and quiet here in North Down. DS is due to fly to London at 06:30 from Belfast City Airport and will be up in couple of hours so just going to read I bed until then. I can't help thinking about rough sleepers tonight☹️

No alert here as in London but interesting to read about where people were

I can't recall the sound from the test

Still pretty windy here, must be even more so in red areas

It sounds like this:

MERP MERP MERP

Maybe. But where do you draw the line? Why do they need to label things as red warnings? When they first started I'm sure there were Mumsnet threads (or letters to the newspapers, or whatever) saying "In my day the information that there would be 90 mph winds was warning enough! Why doesn't the nanny state trust us to make our own judgements?"

😂😂

It got pretty wild here, a tree came down and smashed into a car and the wheelie bins are all over the street. Woke me up about five whistling around the scaffolding thought it might come down at one point. It's quite intermittent now, quiet then suddenly really stong winds for a few mins. Think the worst is probably over

A tree came down across the road just 30 minutes after I drove down it. Somewhat sobering. Nobody was hurt luckily.

Poor warnings lead to more weather related deaths. See Spain last month.

20yo DDs verdict on the alert system 😂