Whatever the post-mortem will say, if the national emergency number goes down, it’s a huge fuck-up. People will die because of this.
The fact that the police has responded in the proper way has nothing to do with how KPN has handled this so far and it immediately puts in question the retiring of the siren system used for emergencies, which for cost-cutting reasons has been replaced by the national mobile phone alert system, which apparently does not work when you really need it.
Other than the outage itself, not much has happened?
Also, what would a siren help in this regard? Can you play the new phone number in morse on the airhorn siren?
- No fall-back system in place.
- Alternative alert system did not work.
- Alternative alert went out with the wrong information.
That seems plenty to me.
As far as the siren is concerned: the general alert system is meant for serious threats to public safety, it does not require 'a new phone number in morse', the output is a single bit: siren on: stay indoors, close doors and windows, wait for all clear sign (three short bursts on the siren).
Also: there was literally no reason at all to stay inside. Sounding the national airhorn alarm because 112 is unreachable is a horrible decision.
Agreed, but 112 not being reachable definitely is. KPN made a big stink about it at the time how other 'crappy' providers could not be trusted to deliver a thing of such national importance and so they got to do it exclusively rather than to have multiple redundant systems by different providers. I'm sure there will be some second guessing of that decision now.
Agreed that sounding the national alarm over this would be an overreaction, as is the fact that they used the national alert, lots of people are going to disable it as a result of this and that will make the system that much less valuable.
As it was some people got no alerts, others got nine and the information dispensed through it was faulty. That's pretty fucked up.
I guess depends on the height of your house - though in quite a few places even rooftop might be below or close to sea level.
The more likely cause for such an alarm is chemical pollution from either an accidental release or a fire. Their old use was for air raids but those are even more unlikely (at the moment, of course this can change).
* Go inside
* Close doors and windows
* Listen to the emergency channel
* Know when it is safe to go outside again
Sirens are sunsetting, but still operational until 2020.
Sending out an incorrect alternative emergency number on the NL-Alert system and not correcting it for about an hour is one instance.
https://www.nu.nl/binnenland/4344848/luchtalarmsirenes-verdw...
A similar problem is happening in the UK; airports trying to centralize air-traffic control to off-site locations to save a few pennies.
Yes it is bad, very bad. But I'm sure they got all the redundancy in place and thought about so much more than we can imagine. But even then there might be some extreme event that will throw 'soot in the food'.
I think it is just great how this event is handled. Almost everybody I know knows the alternative alarm number. Police is in the streets so you can walk to them. And as far as we know there are no looters taking their chances.
So yeah, bad, but we have to wait before we can mark it as big fuckup.