
Germany's nationwide emergency warning day sees bumpy rollout - Ianvdl
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-nationwide-emergency-warning-day-sees-bumpy-rollout/a-54877137
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qayxc
> In the future, the government plans on making the tests an annual event,
> designating September 10 as emergency alarm test day.

That's factually incorrect. The nationwide alarm test day is designated to be
the 2nd Thursday of September - the actual date will naturally differ from
year to to year.

This is just sloppy journalism.

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dewey
Please don't use the code tags for quoting. It makes it very hard to read on
mobile and in case it's a longer sentence the overflow is non-obvious on a
bigger screen too.

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johnnyfaehell
They used the standard syntax used to quote? It doesn't appear to be edited.

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dewey
It got edited and is now fixed. You don't see if something got edited if you
don't manually add "Edit" to the post.

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exar0815
Nothing, absolutely nothing surprises me about that. Public Infrastructure in
the disaster management system is a - disaster.

Example: Yes, my home village and the surrounding 20-30 Villages all have
their old air-raid sirens to notify the members of the fire brigade. A system
which is quite old and was rock solid reliable. During the transistion from
analog radio to digital radio, the receivers were upgraded to be triggered by
digital radio (TETRA to be precise). This, we found out, now means that during
a power outage, there is no way to alert the fire brigade because the sirens
dont have power. We now have people sitting in the fire station again whenever
our Village has a power out to use the on-vehicle radio to communicate with
the dispatch.

TETRA itself is also a disaster. And even worse: Its not even universally
accepted. This means that local muncipalities can decide to stay with the old
analog system while others have the new digital one. In theory, the digital
one has a bazillion advantages. However, all of those advantages in the end
create more problems than they solve.

For example, better voice quality - just leads to people being completely not
understandable when using breathing masks to enter a building (Something to do
with filtering).

Also, analog fails gracefully. Digital stops working. And it stops working a
lot earlier. This means, you now have to use a repeater at the entrance of a
building to talk to people in the building, because the digital radio often
does not work. This happens mostly in direct (Walkie Talkie Mode)

When in cellular mode, good luck finding a signal in 50% of the rural areas -
This mode is vital to talk to the dispatcher to call for support/additional
units.

The whole system is supposed to be used by everyone. Military, Federal and
Local Police, Fire Brigade, EMT... which means there has to be a rights
management system to access certain channels. This is hardcoded into every
device. This often means that a device does not have the permission to
cooperate or that only the one device of the commander can access certain
channels.

There is a 2 Second delay between pressing the talk button and a connection
being established due to the encoding and permission management leading to
people often having to resend because the first words were cut off.

Its just a complete and abject failure everywhere. And you can look wherever
you want, and its the same. Working things get rationalized, or "modernized",
resulting in a less capable, more expensive, more complex system.

Or, in our case, to carry two devices, one digital and one analog.

~~~
qwertox
It really hurts reading this.

I'm not involved in this, but like any other citizen, I rely on this system.

This shows that some people who carry certain responsibilities haven't lived
up to their task, and without this test, we wouldn't have gotten to know this,
while they would still have collected their paycheck as if everything is ok.

The lesson to be learned from this should be to implement a monthly test run,
like other countries are doing.

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skitter
I still don't know why Cell Broadcast isn't employed, even through it would
solve a lot of the problems of using an app. Someone on reddit wrote the BBK
and their answer effectively stated that it isn't used because it isn't used.

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dewey
In the Spiegel article they cited privacy issues (apparently the app doesn't
have that...) which was later changed to "the big telecoms in Germany don't
offer that service".

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netsharc
Fefe has a post (in German) about that, and the first excuse was uttered by
someone in a high position who despite his job title apparently knew nothing
about what he was talking about, and that the paragraph with the excuse got
changed, after "the censor returned from peeing":

[http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a72533](http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a72533)

~~~
mschuster91
Or rather, after some public outrage on Twitter about said incompetency.

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blueflow
Approximately 10 minutes after the Test i learned that i was supposed to have
an app installed - i didn't even have my smartphone with me at that moment.

For some reason, the SMS broadcast was not used.

For some reason, the air raid sirens didn't go off in many cities.

I'm somewhat disappointed - organization in emergency cases is what Germany
usually get right.

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Xylakant
Berlin for example no longer has any sirens at all.

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milgrim
Neither has Bremen, or a lot of other cities. Justifications seem to be that
sirens are not suitable to alert only certain districts, and that a siren
going off is not enough to communicate what exactly is happening. Pretty
flimsy I think, because a siren as a trigger for people to get informed via
radio or TV is the most resilient way to get information to everyone if
something really bad happens.

~~~
johnnyfaehell
I read on bz-berlin.de that in an actual emergency they will have vans driving
around with sirens. So my question is, why didn't they have vans driving
around yesterday if it was a test?

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milgrim
Very good question. I also read about another city (can’t remember which) that
could have used the sirens, but didn’t, because the test happens already on
other dates.

I really expected much more from this test. Feels like we are living in an
underdeveloped country.

~~~
johnnyfaehell
> Feels like we are living in an underdeveloped country.

To be fair, this is pretty much the definition of 1st world problems.

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Slikey
The incompetence starts with the thought that an "app" would reach any
meaninful fraction of the population.

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josefx
I personally do not feel eager to install an app that very likely was written
by the lowest bidder. Especially when the underlying requirements were written
by our politicians, best case we have complete incompetence, worst case
someone saw a way to make the bundestrojaner look harmless.

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zeeZ
I have three of those apps installed, none of them did anything that day.
They've mostly worked in the past, except when larger areas were notified and
you clicked on the notification to get more details the app would show nothing
because whatever its service is running on was overwhelmed by the amount of
people checking..

Meantime vacationing in Japan I can get a Japanese wall of text on my phone
informing me and everyone around me who pulled out their phone of an imminent
earthquake, all without data active.

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trumpeta
That's not actually bad, right? The whole point was to find out if it works.
Now they can fix it before there is an actual emergency

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brazzy
The _degree_ to which it didn't work is a bit embarassing, and it seems like
many of the issues could have been easily identified in advance so that this
big test run could help identify more subtle problems.

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rapnie
In The Netherlands for ages we have an emergency alarm test each first Monday
of the month at noon.

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yxhuvud
Here in Sweden we have them the first Monday every quarter, at 15.00.

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taejo
The same article was discussed yesterday with 101 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24430145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24430145)

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pitkali
It was actually a different article -- about how a test is going to be carried
out. Today's article is about the results.

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taejo
Both links end up at the same place. It seems DW basically replaced a whole
article with another one.

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leahshule56
I didn't hear a siren or get a push notification, I haven't spoken to anyone
that did either, quite the failure...

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cblconfederate
Statism gymnastics everywhere, all the time. I wonder where this will lead to

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kbcool
Cool, let's distract ourselves from an emergency like COVID-19 with an
emergency warning system.

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sokoloff
I’m not sure I understand. Surely as a society we need to be able to (and are
capable to) address more than one thing at a time?

