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Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have fo
by tyleo 4y ago
Why are they useless? I grew up in an area with tornadoes and when one came ripping through my childhood suburb and destroyed some houses I was happy to have forewarning.
- bombcar 4y agoWe get them every single time a thunderstorm sniffs at anything in the tricounty area. There may be a way to turn off the "Watch" alerts and still keep the "we are gonna die" alerts. The one time we got the green sky of doom the phone did explode in a way not normally seen, so I assume they know something about crying wolf. As for amber alerts being useless - something like 90% (?) of the time it's a custody dispute where one parent hasn't returned the kid at the appointed time.
- js2 4y agoI have a weather radio in our bedroom with only two alerts enabled: tornado warning (not watch), and the nuclear power plant 6 miles away just had an incident, whatever that’s called. Weather radio alerts are very granular and most radios will let you configure just the ones you want to hear. https://www.weather.gov/nwr/eventcodes https://www.weather.gov/nwr/eventcodes
- bombcar 4y agoIt's always fun to watch the new people near the plant when the emergency alert warning system is tested. Most people do NOT expect a "voice of God" to start yelling at them out of nowhere, even if it is only a test. Once you know about them, they're relatively easy to spot (look in areas near power plants, downstream of dams, etc). You can find some here and use them as ringtones! https://www.whelenmassnotification.com/recorded-message-library/ https://www.whelenmassnotification.com/recorded-message-libr...
- EE84M3i 4y agoBy "voice of god" do you mean an outside PA system (like air raid sirens)? I didn't know that they had these anywhere in the US other than for tornados.
- palmscenter 4y agoI know of no state in the USA where a child not returning on time is enough to trigger an Amber alert.
- throwaway09223 4y agoYou can get the same alerts via a non-broken (non-regulated) channel. There are apps for that. The government mandated stuff just needs to be turned off because it's broken.
- mrits 4y agoI have amber alerts disabled but still receive weather emergency notifications. Which makes sense. Perhaps it works differently in different states? In Texas my iPhone has this alert granularity: AMBER Emergency Public Safety Test
- bombcar 4y agoThere's WATCH and WARNING and (unnamed) - some locations just send everything WATCH and above (some even send ADVISORY which is incredibly stupid). If the local government is sane, they send WARNING and (unnamed) only - (unnamed) being the YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD MAKE YOUR TIME notices. Then if you want WATCH you set your weather app to notify you on those.
- whacim 4y agoMay also differ by OS. I'm on Android and have options to disable four or five different types of alerts.
- RegnisGnaw 4y agoDepends on where you are. In Canada, our system sends everything as "National/Presidential Alerts". We don't use the different levels at all. So AMBER Alert, Weather Alert, etc are all Presidential/National Alerts.
- bombcar 4y agoDoes Canada even have a president?
- palmscenter 4y agoCanada doesn't have a president, but until it passes a law that requires phones sold in Canada to have Canada-specific features in the alert display, it will say what it says in the USA. And in USA the Presidential Alert is switching to National Alert.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoAmber alerts are not related to tornadoes
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Why are they useless? I can’t speak to tornado alerts, but the Amber Alert child alerts were becoming excessive and useless in my state. I was getting alerts from many hundreds of miles away, often while trying to sleep. Other times they’d forget to put relevant information in the first alert so they’d send several more to follow up. When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off. The system may have started with good intentions, but it was mismanaged and abused so much that it became useless.
- nells 4y ago
- jerf 4y ago"When we finally got a series of multiple Amber alerts in the middle of the night, most of the people I know turned them off." To be honest I wonder if the people in charge were starting to get a kick at waking up so many people, or if they were engaging in some sort of malicious compliance, e.g., maybe the people responsible for sending the alerts out are also pretty pissed off at being woken up to send them out. The stated reason for them existing leaves no room for there to be any reason to be sending these out at 3am, if neither the abductee nor the putative abductor were known to be nocturnal.
- sidewndr46 4y agoI live in Texas. I get Amber alerts for missing children that are 8 hours of interstate driving away from me. That's completely useless.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoEvery single person I know in the NYC area turned off amber alerts in 2013 after being woken up by this one in the middle of the night: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4-am-new-york.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/07/ambert-alert-phone-4... Even older parents called their kids to find out how to make sure it does not happen again.
- bombcar 4y agoIt didn't help at all that phones suddenly had this feature and defaulted to ON (for awhile you couldn't turn off Amber alerts without turning off "They just launched the nukes, kiss your ass goodbye" alerts).
- sidewndr46 4y agoIf we're discussing uselessness, I'm pretty sure warnings of impending war are the peak of this. They've actually killed someone in Hawaii. Let me live my final moments in bliss without worrying about that kind of stuff.
- gedy 4y agoSame in California, and the ones I've received were custody battles between parents...
- palmscenter 4y agoA child was abducted, and in some cases - as happened just a few days ago - the noncustodial parent threatens to kill the child. And does. The fact that the abduction involves a custody dispute is only one of the factors that goes into the decision to send an alert. Many abductions are vehicle thefts where the thief takes off without noticing or caring that there is a child in the car. In one recent case, the thief threw the baby out the window into a ditch. Citizens who received the Amber alert found the child.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoSome areas have weather patterns where warnings are frequent, but actual damage is rare. Cincinnati is like this from personal experience. We get far more injuries and damage from high winds and ice than tornados.
- nonameiguess 4y agoIf you live in a place prone to tornadoes, there should be real citywide outdoor tornado sirens that you'd hear from miles away. Also sending it to your phone doesn't add much unless you're a recording artist in a soundproof studio.
- bombcar 4y agoI was actually surprised how well a modern insulated house blocks the siren. We have one that is on a hill a mile away (there's a second but I don't think I've ever heard it) and it's hard to notice inside (they run a check every month). It IS fun to get the weather warning and then run outside and hear the air-raid siren begin to warm up.
- Kye 4y agoIf you live in the path of water coming through the air from the Gulf of Mexico, you're in popup thunderstorm country. These confuse prediction systems, so you end up with warnings all day, every day for large parts of the year.