New UK Emergency alert system.

[Andrew C]

8 hours ago, mnorwood said:

I think it's not so much that people don't like the idea of being informed about emergencies, it's that they're sceptical about this

system that doesn't work for an entire network, and significant portions of others.  That we paid for.

[Stuart91]

14 hours ago, paulears said:

I really can't see why any emergency system to tell people vital info generated so much bad feeling. 

Without straying too far into politics, there's a more of an assumption amongst many people these days that the government are incompetent and/or self-serving. The actions of a few during Covid has only exacerbated that.

Plus unending media attention that often seems to spin negative.

It seems that the "test" was more of the service providers than the general public (and Three clearly flunked it). I wonder if there would have been a more positive response if that had been made clearer from the outset?

[Andrew C]

I'd certainly understood it to be a "test so you know what it sounds like" rather than "does it work".  In my case, both are still "no".

[themadhippy]

I'm shocked it actually partially worked given  the governments  impeccable record with previous IT projects

[paulears]

Frankly, I'm amazed by the backlash and vitriol here and all over the net. In the past - no system for warning the populace of anything serious. Go back to the 50s and the floods, then the Cold War. The only system was to alert a small number of people, and then they would try to spread the word - apart from the messages on BBC TV and radio and later, independent TV.

Now - somebody had the idea to use a product practically everyone has in their pockets, owned and operated by companies in competition with each other, using multiple networks.

 

It seems to me that the only way anyone could think a public safety system is a BAD thing is if they are frankly a bit paranoid. No system surely must be infinitely worse than any system? I fail to see why it's politicised? Somebody had the idea. They managed to get the comms companies to agree on it, and we had a test. The weird thing is that we are all in the business of making kit talk to each other. We are also well used to our cunning plans not working. All the plans, diagrams, manuals and bits of paper. We plug them up and discover we forgot something. Wrong universe, wrong node, conflicting IPs - strange fixtures that are the mk 2 version of the attribute chart you used. Yet, we expected the new emergency system to work, and as out did not, that is somebodies fault - and most comments suggest it was the Government's. This is just ridiculous. The test did exactly what we all do all the time!! Plug it in and press a button. Then we fix the things that didn't work at all, or change things that sort of half worked.

 

If we have an emergency system that works, we are all better served. If it's via cellular, then we could warn people in a local area far better than knocking on doors! Near me, they discovered a large WW2 bomb. Thousands of people living right next door almost, had to be evacuated and more needed to be told to stay in their homes. The end result was a blown up robot when it went off unexpectedly. The local press had loads of people complaining they didn't know. As I understand the new system, it can work locally, regionally or nationally. Is this not a positive. It's not big brother, it's not government interference and it's not political, it is social. Protect and Survive Mk II.

I'm glad it went wrong, it needed to - it was a test,

[gareth]

Quite - there was so much fuss about this, and I fail to understand why. I was sitting on a railway station waiting for a train at the scheduled test time. There were three distinct 'batches' of tests that I could hear. A bunch of phones did their thing just before 3pm, mine and a few others at just after 3pm, and a few more a couple of minutes after that. People just got their phones out, acknowledged the alerts, and put them away again - job done, no dramas.

However, given the amount of conspiracy theorists peddling their utter b0ll0cks on the web and social media these days, it's no wonder a minority of the more intellectually-challenged members of society decided to jump on the bandwagon of believing that there was far more to it than there actually was.

[sleah]

Well said Paul.

Of course everything is politicised these days. If someone's soup isn't hot enough from the local cafe, it'll probably be "the bl00dy Tories" fault.

In my town we have a labour town council and a tory shire council. Anything wrong be it pot holes or houses being built, it's blamed on the political party rather than the actual plebs that make the descions. It's quite funny when someone is bleeting on about this "bl00dy labour" council not fixing the roads, when it's actually the Tory run shire council who are responsible...

[Bryson]

And lets be clear here, the system in use wasn't really designed from the ground up by the UK Government, it's based heavily on WEA / CAP developed in the USA and used pretty much everywhere.  (And, of course, its the cellphone networks that do most of the heavy lifting - as evidenced by Three messing it up the first time...)

[dbuckley]

And by "everywhere", that has included New Zealand for a while now.  We like to whine about it, cos, well, we're kiwis, but it does actually deliver the goods, and in a country that is prone to things happening, it's quite handy.

 

Here's a recent message:

 

The outcome was not good, the third major bout of flooding in a short time.

 

[kerry davies]

Why so negative? The English Environment Agency already had a flood alert system that warns people who will never get flooded and doesn't warn others whose homes are under water. Had they fixed that first it might have helped but they used to warn us up  here in Y Bannau Brycheiniog about floods affecting housing estates built by the idiot Saxons on Herefordshire flood plains because we have a HR postcode. 

The solution was to turn off alerts from Welsh mobile masts which, because of our hills, also cover large swathes of affected water meadows across the border. As if that wasn't enough English ineptness the EA have today announced that they are cancelling a £50M flood alleviation project in England so they are likely to  wake you up at 3 am for a non-existent flood but won't do anything to minimise real flood risk. 

[Bryson]

And here's a Canadian one: