3 ms·

I doubt there's no way to test these systems without actually blaring the sirens

• tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  You can simulate everything to some extent but you can't have an end-to-end test without actually testing. You also want to make sure that people know what the sirens sound like (no, they don't sound the same everywhere), and a national test day is a great opportunity to remind people how they should act if the sirens go off for real. Having them go off once a year at a pre-announced time also isn't particularly disruptive. The proper way to test this would be to also make sure that e.g. the radio stations are informed of a test scenario and broadcast it (sirens means "turn on the radio and check for what is happening", which means the sirens alone are useless without that part of the alerting working). This would also help if someone lives under a rock and knows how to act but forgot that testing is happening. Since this part is not being tested, I think there's a high risk that the announcement in the radio won't work in an actual emergency, and an announcement on the Internet is extremely likely to be unreachable due to overload. I think it would be ideal to actually run large scale emergency response tests (pick a small town, pick a disaster, and actually run the whole scenario, either asking people to volunteer, compensating them, or making it mandatory under a draft-like law). Yes, this would be extremely disruptive (hence a small town), but from having run emergency responses (to IT incidents, not life-or-death incidents), my experience is that any procedure that isn't regularly practiced won't work when needed, and running exercises and fixing what you find will improve this a lot.