Bliddy Critical Alerts/Weather warnings

Why not just turn them off?

If this is the same as the national (regional) alert messages that were publicised around a year ago with a test alert then there were instructions at the time about completely disabling this feature on your phone. Youtube is your friend if you want to disable them.

Is this something else you have signed up to?

Probably the multiple messages are now as a result of the a*******s in Wales who claimed that they didn't get enough warning last time even though the message was on all the popular media and weather forecasts days beforehand.

No, I turned off the alerts a few years ago when it warned me (here in the uk) about a tropical storm half a planet away. I didn't need an alert last night, I could hear the winds, innit? Not heard anything crashing about, but will go and peek out the back door ...

I've been wondering for whom these emergency alerts are intended. I came up with the following list:

1. Anyone who doesn't watch TV
2. Anyone who doesn't listen to the radio
3. Anyone who doesn't read the newspapers
4. Anyone who doesn't use a news app or looks at the news in a browser
5. Anyone who doesn't talk to anyone else in the area
6. Anyone who has just woken up from a coma.

Any others?

That seems a bad plan to me.

You are ignoring the possibility of something occurring that needs immediate attention. For example, a tsunami alert.

When Putin nukes us I'm not sure that I want a 4 minute warning.

What warnings do you think are going to be important for you that you wouldn't have got from other sources days beforehand?

I gave an example elsewhere in this thread - tsunami. But, dam failure springs to mind. Toxic fumes from a fire ...

I think you might be confusing that with the Severn bore...

The problem with emergency alerts is they can't be restricted to the affected area if it's expected to be limited. What happens then after several of these is that people get "desensitised" by alarms which don't affect them.

And, as I mentioned in a thread 18 months ago, a loud sound suddenly going off when you least expect it could cause an accident. As the OP stated "...now made me jump or drop things three times". What if it had been boiling hot water he dropped? Or a flame? If they want to do an alert, at least make the sound build up from a quiet level.

It should not be too hard to add software to only broadcast the alerts from phone masts in the affected areas or for a phone app to use its location to decide whether or not to accept the alert - the latter could also allow for alerts for people, who are not in the area, but who normally live or work in it or have vulnerable relatives there.

Always a big problem in Wales.

You’ll get one anyway, turning off the Nuclear Attack warning in the same way as the recent weather alerts isn’t possible.

Quite what one does when getting a NA alert is probably a matter of where one is and what one is doing.

A Nuclear Attack warning…

First you'd need a system that can manage to broadcast alerts from all masts on all networks ...

Isn't that what the current alert system does?

The recent(ish) test showed it didn't work properly.

I live half way up a f****ng mountain, any tsunami like to affect me means the world is ending after an asteroid hit the oceans and an text alert will be of no use whatsoever.

Woss your height above sea-level ??

That's my car. There is no difference between a warning "Hey it's cold outside maybe frosty you should take care" and an alert "STOP engine now or you'll bugger it." So you drive along and it goes BONG and you jump and frantically peer at the numerous displays only to find it's something trivial.

In the days when actually believed in Man Made Climate Change I moved from -2 feet below sea level to 300 feet above.

That was in 1993.

In 31 years the sea level hasn't changed by more than 4 inches :-)

My old cottage is still where it always was.