Was that alert really necessary?

If you were in the UK on Friday 14th at around 7pm, you were probably about to have a chill night, perhaps watching a boxset or something. But instead, millions of phones across England and Wales triggered a loud alarm disturbing their night and has potentially caused problems for hundreds or thousands across the country.

In case you’re unaware of the alert, it was an alert notifying people to basically not start fires in hot weather due to the recent ongoing issues with wildfires. An example is attached below.

This emergency alert is the largest non-test emergency alert to date across the UK, but questions remain on whether it was handled the best. I have a few quick points I wanted to go over on why I personally think the alert was poorly planned.

Same information could have been conveyed via a SMS message

I’m not sure if you all remember but in the past where there has been serious incidents before the emergency alerts system, information was conveyed by SMS. I think this was only ever used twice during the COVID-19 first lockdown and then the booster program, but this shows that we have the capability of messaging lots of people with the general safety advice without a scary alarm and causing unnecessary panic. I believe using the alert for this purpose has reduced people keeping alerts enabled if they’re going to be used like the way it was.

I get that in general, sending out mass SMS messages are largely inefficient for actual emergencies through a bit of reading on location based SMS but given this went out to most of the nation I think sending a message via SMS would have been fine.

Notice should have been provided

Given that we’ve already established that this isn’t really an ’emergency’ given it’s just general safety advice and has been going on for weeks, I think notice should have been provided. The first I heard of this alert was when my mum’s phone sounded and then I had a message about an emergency alert from someone on Discord. You only find out when tuning into news sources that an alert was sent out at 7pm for wildfires.

I strongly believe some level of notice was necessary. Even a couple of hours would have been something. The unexpected sending of this emergency alert has no doubt sounded on secret phones that domestic violence victims have and may alert the abuser to the presence of these secret phones. I’m not sure what communication was officially sent out by the government in the past for tests, but based on what I’ve read, sometimes the advice has been just been to switch the phone off rather than actually disabling it on the phone. This is a bit of a problem when there’s not an actual emergency and it wasn’t announced in advance. Additionally, turning it off isn’t always perfect since I’ve received messages from others who thought they had it disabled, my mum thought she had it disabled and I’ve experienced behaviour on my own phone where it can pop back up when swapping SIMs sometimes (in testing, I turned on a Plus PL based eSIM and turned off my main Lebara pSIM which completely made the setting disappear considering they don’t support emergency alerts, and then turned on a giffgaff eSIM turning my Plus eSIM off which popped up with a notification saying my settings have changed).

Not planned well enough

Os ydych chi yng ngwlad hyfryd Cymru, efallai eich bod chi wedi derbyn dau rybudd. Oh sorry could you not read that? In Wales and surrounding areas, alerts were sent twice to people. Do you want to know why? They sent the original message in Welsh and then sent the English version later on, rather than including them both in the same message. So if you’re Welsh, you get startled twice for free… or as a person in Ceredigion put it, you’ll be alerted of a nuclear war 4 minutes before the rest of us. How lucky!

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Yeah I know this is probably a random article to make but I just wanted to talk about it. Hope you enjoyed reading even if this isn’t the best quality. I just want sending national alerts to be better planned in the future, I was reading about people mistaking the alert for a fire alarm on a cellular forum. because they were blissfully unaware of this alert.

If you want to turn alerts off, you can head to Settings > Safety & emergency > Emergency alerts and turn Allow Alerts off on an Android device. On iOS, hop into Settings > Notifications and scroll to the bottom to disable alerts.