Nearly jumped out my skin a few minutes ago when sirens started blaring. The emergency alert system just triggered, with this generic message about wildfires.
Not any actual impending ones about to burn my house down. Just the general possibility. Because of a heatwave nobody has apparently noticed.
Thought the bomb was about to drop for a second. Has nobody in our government heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Sorry if this is venting but this rather caught me by surprise.
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I wonder how many people crashed their cars trying to figure out if they were about to be obliterated in a nuclear inferno.
This was supposed to be for emergencies, not PSAs.
“Please don’t start wildfires” isn’t a good reason to set off the modern equivalent of an air raid siren. I hope this isn’t a trend as people will be more likely to disable the system.
An emergency alert like this should only be used if there is an actual danger. Ideally localised which IIRC this system can be, so if the local national park had an out of control wildfire I would be fine with a county wide alert going out about it.
Completely agree. I was personally a little annoyed at this usage. There can actually be consequences for some people to have a very sudden, loud, intrusive noise.
If nothing else, how about just the increased risk of car accidents that comes from more people being sleep-deprived after being woken up in the middle of the night by a warning siren?
It was early evening that most went off, although some people got it hours later. Also it seems like it was sent out twice.
Was at an open mic night and occasionally heard some going off hours later.
This is such a weird use of this system. Months of wildfires and Labours first action is to send a phone alert that amounts to ‘only you can stop wildfires.’
Even better, an hour or two after it was sent a local business set off fireworks. Fucking stupidity everywhere.
They only brought in a ban on disposal BBQs today after dithering about it for ages.
A reluctance to do anything practical but they are very trigger happy in abusing an emergency alert system.
Do you guys have any sort of “fire ban/fire restriction” legislation? It sounds like you don’t have normal channels of communication for this kind of thing, hence the emergency alerts.
Maybe your government can do a bit of copy and paste from Australia, eg this is my “fire info” page for my home state of Queensland, showing which shire council areas currently have a fire ban in place.
All this stuff is enforced via legislation at state level here, which you don’t have a direct equivalent of. Probably something higher than shire councils and lower than UK parliament would deal with it over there as it’s broadly region based. Once it’s legislated with various steps between “all ok” and “don’t even light a match”, the decision to enforce a ban doesn’t take much dithering about. Here bans can be put in place by the Queensland fire department at their discretion so politicians keep out of it.
We also have signs like these sprinkled around the place so that people know when it’s not a great time to be having a bonfire. In Australia that usually ends up being one continuous block between October and March.
We more have “flood action plans”, “flood alerts” and so on, because generally speaking, our problem is too much water, not too much fire. I can’t remember there ever being “wildfires” in the UK ever (doesn’t mean it didn’t happen). How would anything set on fire when everything is permanently wet?
So in a way this is either a freakish one-off anomaly, or this now normal for every year of the rest of our lives.
I’m still expecting our traditional floods and deadly wind storms in a few weeks.
Don’t expect traditional floods. The dead, crispy, grass and plants everywhere means landslides and goodness knows what to the structures around them.
Also the dry, solid mud surface won’t absorb water very easily, so the water will flow over it instead of soaking into it. Basically all our “soakaway” is possibly compromised.
Its ok, we’ll be having both for the rest of our lives.
Most places that do ban fires here just ban them all year round. Never seen them compare different types of fire either, its always any flame is banned if they do. As if a camp fire and camping stove are the same risk…
Obviously with how dry things are in a lot of places right now I get banning all fires. But in January after a week of endless rain the same signs are there.
What practical things would you have them do?
Make the fossil fuel industry pay for solar panels.
Lol.
Felt like an underlining of their new policy to
banadjust the guidelines to voluntarily stop the use of disposable BBQs. They are under a lot of pressure to actually do some mitigation since water is running low and crops are failed but apparently this was the actual action, banning BBQs and alerting everyone to that new guideline!!!Only disposable BBQs, which I support because they are shit to cook on.
Guys, you are now living in Australia.
Well, if that’s what it’s going to be used for then I’ve switched it off. Stupid use of the system.
On android search emergency alerts in your settings.
Even if you switch it off, you will get notifications most of the time because the gov can just enforce them to be received so you may aswell just re-enable it to be sure to not lose anything
Thanks, I didn’t realise there was an option to disable it.
You’d think they’d save this klaxon style alert for imminent danger, not “don’t use barbecues”. What the hell.
Yeah, I won’t turn it off for a single unnecessary alert but if they keep using it for stuff like this I probably will.
Are they going to give us alerts to drive safely next?
All mine are swtched off.
They still come through in BC Canada. Doesn’t care about the settings; they all play anyway.
Amber Alerts, Emergency Warnings, Tests, all of them play regardless.
There’s been 6 here, since May this year. 2 of those were between 12am and 1am.
At that point, I would just switch it off at night.
It’s my alarm.
This proved they will just use it for announcing their latest damp squib policies so zero point keeping it on, they are only going to abuse it.
Damp squib*
What could go wrong
Well, anyone with a secret phone they’re e.g. hiding from an abusive spouse has had that blown, haven’t they? But at least they now know portable barbecues and fireworks are a Not Very Good Idea when the country is basically a tinderbox. So, there’s that.
There were months of warning about the emergency alert system when it was introduced for exactly that reason, including widely-publicised instructions on how to turn them off.
The guidance has been around for a while now to disable alerts on secret phones. We can’t just not send out alert messages because of this.
Yeah but this alert was just a request to not start forest fires.
However it does seem people still aren’t getting that.
That’s on them🤷
Literal birthplace of the Oxford Comma and they still don’t use it. Smh my head.
went through the same emotion range. from oh shit it’s going down to “you interrupted me for that?”
Yep, we assumed incoming attack. Then saw it was nothing.
I had a second fucking alert a few hours later.
The tea time alert will be next.
The dullness of bureaucracy will smooth out even the sharpest of minds.
Yeah this proper shit me up! Is it the first time this system has been used in anger?
Anger?
Not used in a test scenario.
No, they have been used plenty of times for storms, a few times for flooding, and once for a WWII bomb
“placing lives, homes, businesses and emergency responders at risk”
Priorities…
I am in Northern Ireland, so out of scope of it - yet I heard it come through on BBC Radio 4
