New UK Emergency alert system.

[bruce]

Growing up in a rural town in the 70s, before the days of mobile phones and pagers - even phones in the house weren't too common - there was an old air-raid siren on the tower of the town hall. It was controlled from the fire station, about half a mile away, and used to call out the volunteer fire brigade.

It was tested every Monday evening - if we were playing in the area, the firemaster (who lived above the fire station) used to let us press the button....

[the kid]

33 minutes ago, J Pearce said:

Where I rehearse with a brass band is next door to a large chemical works that process phosphorus compounds.

They have a siren that can be heard for a mile or 2 around, which is tested annually. The bandroom has a ‘red’ phone.

The local canals used to catch fire as the water lapped at the edges.

 

Oh RAL / cullam labs / that whole part of Oxfordshire has sirens all over. On visits its usual to have the safety talk of "fire alarm sounds like a bell, go outside. siren sounds like a siren thats get away from windows and doors and don't go outside. If both go off avoid the smoke, but don't go outside." 

On 4/5/2023 at 8:33 AM, paulears said:

Ha! That was my world in the 80s and 90s. I think ynot too? Civil defence college at easingwold, and police officers delivering PJ996 batteries and maroons to post offices and pubs in the villages. I had to retrain one postmaster, because he organised a test. He pretended the ticking box shouted out an alert, let off his maroons and wound the handle on his siren. Warned all the locals and did his own little exercise. Missing the point that it was supposed to be secret, until needed. Few younger people know that at the police station was the gizmo with two red telephone handsets, where the officer would have pressed the button and said attack warning red. I got sent to a small town fifteen miles away to collect a green goddess control room with pump up masts and radios. It lived in a lock-up had an MOT each year and from the 50s when new, had been kept, just in case. Back in the 90s I thought this fun. Looking back, it was pure dad’s army.

You say dads army, as if anyone is better. I am not sure if anyone really is. Every building or area in Sweden has a bomb shelter of some form. usually a basement that has been mothballed in to storage. My old place had one to accommodate 60 or 80 I think, about 50m away under the doctors there is one for more. The new builds opposite wont say its a bomb shelter but its not NOT when its a carpark a floor or so underground and fully serviced.   There is a massive one thats in Stockholm, I think at any time has to be clearable in weeks and can maintain a fair number of people. Helsinki has a massive network of tunnels. But the whole thing is run on bell wire at best. its all mothballed but maintained in some degree by slightly odd old guys. Even a few years ago before the current situation we were reminded of needing to maintain a storage of items. My old boss was a click under 60 and maintained his family stock hard. a fully cycled setup as I understood.  but all this "stuff" existed here also.

We had until really not long ago a large number of maintained runways hidden. Large long stretches of roads appeared on main roads roughly a few km long, that also were in woodlands, that absolutely didnt have side roads attached that were roughly a gripen wingspan.  But that plan is and was maintained by the territorials. They even practiced a few years back on one of the remaining ones - https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/6777125 . 

[paulears]

It really was like Dad's Army. All parties would meet occasionally and 'update' plans. One of the senior people was a retired army officer and was fixated on commandeering things - like lorries, boats, helicopters. My role was communications, so Plan 24C would be opened and the scenario talked through. Invariably, he manage to commandeer a few things - like a fishing boat and a helicopter normally tasked with North Sea gas/oil personnel transport. So he'd talk about the commandeered helicopter talking to the fishing boat on the radio and I'd step in and point out the fishing boat could not talk to the helicopter. He'd talk down to me like Captain Square in Dad's Army - clearly I had no idea, but I would have to point out the fishing boat had a marine radio and the helicopter had an aviation one. He then had a Police officer talking to the ambulance and I'd wave a hand again. Other participants would do the same when their specialities got mangled, like the Police vehicle guy trying to explain they only had petrol, not diesel at that unit. We never made progress. I've so many crazy stories from that time. Even getting threatened by the security services for not keeping secrets, and then them discovering none of us had signed the forms we'd been told we had to sign, but that had never arrived. We were really poorly trained and it was for many of us a social thing. In a bunker one day, the Police officer did a straw poll on which of us would actually be here if the sh*t hit the fan for real - The general consensus was we'd all be with our families taking our chances than being in the bunker with them left outside. The scientists who worked for the local Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture who did the fallout monitoring and calculations didn't even want to be there - they'd just been sent. The fella in the ROC who was with us was extremely odd, had terminal BO and drove a Brown Skoda - which in the 80s/90s was not considered a car of choice for many. The joke was nobody wanted to be shut up with him. The County Emergency Planning Officer was a bit scary, but he had a very responsible job. His function now is simply part of the role of a recent graduate who seems to know very little about emergency planning. 

[Ynot]

15 hours ago, Simon Lewis said:

The timing of the alert has now been set at 3pm on the 23rd, so as to avoid sporting events etc.

Though it won't avoid any venues with Sunday afternoon matinees... (And there are a few, even in the West End)

My guess is that those venues will have to post signs warning punters to ACTUALLY turn off their mobiles, rather than just set them to 'stun', but my other guess is that a LOT of them will ignore that - even if the test being due is included in the pre-show announcements... 
It only takes a couple to let the whole audience know they didn't comply...

 

[Ynot]

On 4/5/2023 at 7:33 AM, paulears said:

Ha! That was my world in the 80s and 90s. I think ynot too? 

SSSSSH!!!

We're not supposed to tell....

Oh - OK, it's common knowledge now 😄 😄 😄

So yeah - spent quite a few days down some of the ROC underground posts back in the early 80s, wondering at the 1940s vintage gear down there. And checked off a fair few of the direct circuits that fed the sirens...

[Ynot]

Another open 'secret' (these days) are the underground facilities in BT exchanges. Most notable in my experience was under one of the Birmingham main exchanges (if you know it, you know it, but might be wise to still keep shtumm).

Down there is a fair sized facility with bunk rooms, canteen facilities, operations areas, generators and a manual switchboard which used to have private wires to other main (back then, GPO) centres.

Word was that if the balloon went up, the nominate senior (in rank) engineers would be allowed down there, along with some of the (majority female) operators from the other floors. The engineers for obvious technical reasons, but whilst the operators were ostensibly for staffing the switchboard, the 'other reason' was to ensue there were enough pairs of humans to start repopulation once the dust had cleared... How true that was..... well..... 😮

There are also miles of tunnels deep underground linking key buildings, though I guess those are probably all defunct now other than as cable routes. But I believe that the fire service have at times used them, dark and filled with smoke machine smoke as training grounds.

[richardash1981]

On 4/6/2023 at 8:02 PM, J Pearce said:

Where I rehearse with a brass band is next door to a large chemical works that process phosphorus compounds.

They have a siren that can be heard for a mile or 2 around, which is tested annually. The bandroom has a ‘red’ phone.

On 4/6/2023 at 8:53 PM, the kid said:

Oh RAL / cullam labs / that whole part of Oxfordshire has sirens all over. On visits its usual to have the safety talk of "fire alarm sounds like a bell, go outside. siren sounds like a siren thats get away from windows and doors and don't go outside. If both go off avoid the smoke, but don't go outside."

Sounds similar to working next to a (civil) Uranium facility, only there they test the wide area siren monthly, their internal alarms weekly. Same drill that the air raid siren means take cover (windows, doors, and upstairs if possible because uranium hexafluoride is heavier than air), the ordinary alarm bell is the local building fire alarm.

Slightly worryingly we no longer have any sort of red phone (it's all gone VoIP), just a battery (analogue) radio in the emergency box in the designated refuge locations, as per the advice to other local residents.

What you are supposed to do if you are waiting at the (unstaffed) train station, where the waiting shelter has no doors and a gap all the way round at floor level, I don't know! It's a significant walk to reach any other building without heading directly towards the hazard site!

[musht]

On 4/6/2023 at 11:53 PM, Ynot said:

Most notable in my experience was under one of the Birmingham

Anchor https://youtu.be/PI8dwPa5fvM

Manchester has Guardian and London Kingsway.

Big picture https://www.subbrit.org.uk/

 

[GridGirl]

On 4/7/2023 at 5:30 AM, bruce said:

Growing up in a rural town in the 70s, before the days of mobile phones and pagers - even phones in the house weren't too common - there was an old air-raid siren on the tower of the town hall. It was controlled from the fire station, about half a mile away, and used to call out the volunteer fire brigade.

It was tested every Monday evening - if we were playing in the area, the firemaster (who lived above the fire station) used to let us press the button....

Still used in small towns with volunteer fire brigades in New Zealand.  My parents have a holiday house in one such small town and as kids we got quite accustomed to hearing it go off.  Out of interest I’ve just looked it up and they generally attend 70-100 call-outs a year.

[ANDYLASER]

On 4/6/2023 at 8:53 PM, the kid said:

Oh RAL / cullam labs / that whole part of Oxfordshire has sirens all over. On visits its usual to have the safety talk of "fire alarm sounds like a bell, go outside. siren sounds like a siren thats get away from windows and doors and don't go outside. If both go off avoid the smoke, but don't go outside."

At Sellafield, I had to learn 7 different alarms. "If you hear the one that like a cross between an air raid siren and a U boat dive alram, then I suggest running really fast. Keep running, dont stop, then run some more". 😨

[sparkyweb]

On 4/3/2023 at 6:26 PM, adamburgess said:

EDIT

So, checking my phone, it doesn't say Virgin next to the 5G signal bars. It says "1B Meals"

A Ramadan charity thing, I guess.

I was in Dubai last week and was jumping between Du & Etisalat and I had the same message. It must be UAE network wide. Having spent a lot of time in the UAE over the last 10 years or so I have noticed this a lot and thought it both odd and interesting that they use the network name in this way

[kerry davies]

... aaaand cut! First alarm, first colonialist screw up by the feudal English who got the Welsh language message so wrong they turned "ddiogel" into "Vogel" with a capital "V" which letter does not exist in the Welsh alphabet.

Ddiogel = safe. 

Vogel appears to be a Swiss herbalist or a German idiot.

Edited April 23, 2023 by kerry davies

[GaryNattrass]

Your early warning wake up call is sponsored by those nice people from G4s and in conjunction with the CO-OP funeral service! 😀 

[sandall]

2 hours ago, kerry davies said:

 first colonialist screw up by the feudal English who got the Welsh language message so wrong

Would you rather have had the robotic American we got on this side of the border?

[callumb]

Could be worse! Three users never got the warning.