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> 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 test

• invalidusernam3 6y ago
  Same in Prague (first Wednesday of each month). I've been on calls for work the past couple times, people always ask me what the background noise is. Here it's a siren, and then a spoken message (in Czech and then in English) telling people the emergency broadcast system is being tested. It goes on for a good 5 minutes. At the start of the lockdown they blasted this [1] children's song over the broadcast system to try cheer everyone up [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YWcQRKNyjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YWcQRKNyjM
• silvester23 6y ago
  As others in this thread have noted, sirens are tested (at least) once a year locally. What makes this special is that it is a centralized test for the whole country with other channels being tested as well (TV, Radio, mobile app). Where I live, it was rather underwhelming. I probably would not have noticed if I hadn't known about it before which may be a bad sign, to be honest.
• rasz 6y ago
  Sirens turn on every year on 1 August (and sometimes also September) in Poland too, has something to do with Germany 81 years ago.
• flohofwoe 6y ago
  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.