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Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

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Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#51

Post by sc11 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #43
taejo wrote: post #13

Correction to the article: the annual test day will be the second Thursday in September, not always the tenth. I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used. Surely many people don't have the app installed? I'd never heard of it and I've lived in this country the whole time it's been available.

> I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used Because of utterly dumb people in charge: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/warntag-zum-ziv... > Unger: Ja, die Niederlande zum Beispiel setzen auf dieses Cell-Broadcast-System. Wir haben davon Abstand genommen, weil die Mobilfunknetze - wie man etwa an Silvester sieht - im Fall der Fälle nicht ausreichen. Hinzu kommt ein datenschutzrechtliches Problem. W…

Privacy report of NINA: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/de.materna....

Sure looks like they take data protection seriously by including advertising trackers...

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#52

Post by Grumbledour »

_Microft wrote: post #48
mschuster91 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used Because of utterly dumb people in charge: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/warntag-zum-ziv... > Unger: Ja, die Niederlande zum Beispiel setzen auf dieses Cell-Broadcast-System. Wir haben davon Abstand genommen, weil die Mobilfunknetze - wie man etwa an Silvester sieht - im Fall der Fälle nicht ausreichen. Hinzu kommt ein datenschutzrechtliches Problem. W…

Feedback: this comment might have fared better if it hadn't contained completely unnecessary insults.

As a fellow German, I can understand the anger, though.

Basically, we don't have a warning system anymore, because the pieces that are left are mostly being dismantled (sirens, tv and radio) and all they seem to want to replace it with is an app that doesn't reliably work when the network is fine.

Lets be honest, if catastrophy should strike here, we would be last to know.

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#53

Post by rasz »

docdeek wrote: post #31

> Air raid sirens sounded for one straight minute starting at 11 a.m., testing their tones full blast before varying the pitch of the tone. The sirens are tested in Lyon, France on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary but interesting that Germany hasn’t done it in so long.

Sirens turn on every year on 1 August (and sometimes also September) in Poland too, has something to do with Germany 81 years ago.

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#54

Post by brnt »

mauz0r wrote: post #27

People in The Netherlands are used to this sound, hearing it every first Monday of the month at noon for the last 17 years now. I wonder how effective this will work in case of real trouble. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/terrorismebestrijdi...

Same here. Colloquially, it's the monthly 'Germans invading again' alarm ;)

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#55

Post by T-A »

LandR wrote: post #10
_the_inflator wrote: post #2

Tension in Europe is real. This was planned well ahead of pandemics and possibility of war is finally on the table.

Where in Europe is war a possiblilty?

Apart from the obvious [1], you may have noticed Lukashenko's repeated claims that NATO is threatening Belarus [2].

A war of convenience, started to justify a Russian military intervention in the country, could easily get out of hand due to the sensitivity of the region, in particular the Suwalki gap [3].

Countries around the area, including neutral Sweden, have been ratcheting up their military preparedness to that possibility [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbass

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/29/president-lukashenko-cla...

[3] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/suwalki...

[4] https://www.politico.eu/article/security-alert-sweden-gotlan...

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#56

Post by mschuster91 »

Grumbledour wrote: post #52
_Microft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feedback: this comment might have fared better if it hadn't contained completely unnecessary insults.

As a fellow German, I can understand the anger, though. Basically, we don't have a warning system anymore, because the pieces that are left are mostly being dismantled (sirens, tv and radio) and all they seem to want to replace it with is an app that doesn't reliably work when the network is fine. Lets be honest, if catastrophy should strike here, we would be last to know.

This x100. It's an utter catastrophe. We had a fully working siren network (at least across Western Germany), and after the end of the Cold War it all got left to rot to pieces - estimates for rebuilding it are well into the hundreds of millions of euro range.

And then the whole radio clusterfuck. AM radio got totally torn down years ago to "cut costs", there's always discussions to dismantle plain old FM radio too and only serve DAB+ instead, which doesn't have nearly the buildout level compared to plain old FM radio.

I'm sick of this shit. Three decades and all what we had went down the drain. It's the same for coronavirus response - back in cold war times we had massive rolling stockpiles of everything, especially of PPE... but again, it all got eliminated to "cut costs".

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#57

Post by eythian »

mauz0r wrote: post #27

People in The Netherlands are used to this sound, hearing it every first Monday of the month at noon for the last 17 years now. I wonder how effective this will work in case of real trouble. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/terrorismebestrijdi...

I kinda figure that if people heard the lunchalarm going off at a different time, they'd just assume it was Monday noon and it'd confuse the rest of their week.

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#58

Post by rawbot »

taejo wrote: post #13

Correction to the article: the annual test day will be the second Thursday in September, not always the tenth. I don't understand why Cell Broadcast is not used. Surely many people don't have the app installed? I'd never heard of it and I've lived in this country the whole time it's been available.

I have simply no idea who thought it was a good idea to implement a nation-wide warning system on an app that has ~15k downloads[0]~. We already get warnings through cell broadcast here in Hamburg for the weather (last year we got multiple high wind warnings). I'm very disappointed.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.materna.bbk...

Edit: As a commenter pointed out, it has 1M+ downloads. But I'm still unsure why is there is even an app, when you can use the cell broadcasted warnings, which everyone with a modern phone get, regardless whether they have an app installed.

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#59

Post by amadeuspagel »

jiehong wrote: post #36
mauz0r wrote: post #27

People in The Netherlands are used to this sound, hearing it every first Monday of the month at noon for the last 17 years now. I wonder how effective this will work in case of real trouble. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/terrorismebestrijdi...

Bavaria here, and every first Saturday the siren goes off for testing purposes as well. This was supposed to be bigger scale though. Haven’t heard anything today.

I'm also in bavaria and did hear it. Probably a problem in your city, not in all of bavaria.

Re: Germany conducts first nationwide emergency warning day in decades

#60

Post by flohofwoe »

docdeek wrote: post #31

> Air raid sirens sounded for one straight minute starting at 11 a.m., testing their tones full blast before varying the pitch of the tone. The sirens are tested in Lyon, France on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary but interesting that Germany hasn’t done it in so long.

AFAIK the sirens that still exist in Germany are also still tested regularly, or at least this happened in my home village until recently, now I'm not sure when I heard that last time.

The "problem" is that most sirens had been removed in the 90's when it became less likely that Germany would be steamrolled by Soviet tanks.

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