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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Approximately 10 minutes after the Test i learned that i was supposed to have an app installed - i didn't even have my smartphone with me at that moment.

For some reason, the SMS broadcast was not used.

For some reason, the air raid sirens didn't go off in many cities.

I'm somewhat disappointed - organization in emergency cases is what Germany usually get right.

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Cell broadcast is not foreseen to be used in Germany. And my guess is that this „Warntag“ was introduced to prove that the German approach to notify its citizens in these situations (smartphone app, sirens, radio and tv broadcasts) is sufficient and nothing else has to be done to fulfill the upcoming EU-Alert standard that has to be implemented by the member states by 2022. The incompetence of the responsible agencies is ridiculous. Curious to see what the outcome of this will be and if there is any improvement next year.

> not foreseen to be used in Germany

I don't understand what you mean by that.

Edited - ah, I think you mean they're not planning on using it?

However tangentially - Lithuania never used them and then a few years ago suddenly started using them for pretty much everything (i.e. bad weather at the beach) which is ridiculously annoying as phones have some special type of ringtone for that which makes them almost explode in your face every time they make that announcement.

Yes, that’s what I tried to say. Not a native speaker ;)

Not so easy to implement this the right way I guess. For local emergencies the German app solution seems to work adequately, but for big emergencies the cell broadcast should definitely be an option.

But I see your point, a system like that should be used in a reasonable manner.

Edit: and by „not foreseen to be used“ I mean that Germany can’t, because we don’t have the required technical infrastructure.

> For local emergencies the German app solution seems to work adequately

Are you sure about this? While the NINA App did provide me with weather warnings as well as (possibly pinned) warning about the Coronavirus, I have no information about the delay with which those messages were provided to me. It could well have been a delay of over half an hour or more, without me noticing it.

Yesterday I decided to uninstall the NINA App, since it showed me that it doesn't work. It had all the permissions necessary to pop up a message and to notify my with a sound, yet it didn't do anything.

No, I am not sure about the delay. But the app informed me a few times about things that were happening (fires, bomb disposals) that I would otherwise not have know about.

And it looks like the delay yesterday was actually caused by the bavarians (http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a4ef27). But that something like this is even possible in this system is ridiculous of course -.-

This could also be used for local things, by limiting which towers broadcast the message and which don't. No gps, app or data plan required.

Berlin for example no longer has any sirens at all.

Neither has Bremen, or a lot of other cities. Justifications seem to be that sirens are not suitable to alert only certain districts, and that a siren going off is not enough to communicate what exactly is happening. Pretty flimsy I think, because a siren as a trigger for people to get informed via radio or TV is the most resilient way to get information to everyone if something really bad happens.

I read on bz-berlin.de that in an actual emergency they will have vans driving around with sirens. So my question is, why didn't they have vans driving around yesterday if it was a test?

Very good question. I also read about another city (can’t remember which) that could have used the sirens, but didn’t, because the test happens already on other dates.

I really expected much more from this test. Feels like we are living in an underdeveloped country.

> Feels like we are living in an underdeveloped country.

To be fair, this is pretty much the definition of 1st world problems.

They do, also for stuff like contaminated tap water. Kind of looks like the scene from Chernobyl, vans with sirens and speakers driving around town announcing stuff. But it works.

AFAICS sirens aren't intended to warn the populace so much as calling firemen to make it to the fire trucks ASAP. But that's only for voluntary fire brigades in villages rather than professional brigades ready to jump onto trucks immediately, with fireman's poles and such.

Until the 90s the sirens in west Germany were also used for civil defense purposes. After the Cold War the system was dismantled on federal level and only some cities have it now.

Berlin for example has a large number of voluntary fire brigades in addition to the professional fire brigades. They’re alerted in cases where manpower from the professional brigade is insufficient and/or tied up in other incidents.

However, even voluntarily fire brigades usually use beepers instead of sirens nowadays.

My guess is, though, that these are located in former villages that became part of the city 80-100 years ago, like in Hamburg.

No, it’s actually all throughout the city, pretty much every district has at least one, many have multiple bases: https://www.berliner-feuerwehr.de/ueber-uns/freiwillige-feue...

Exactly, I thought that I missed them, but turns out they did not even go off at all.

I mean… this is why we have tests, isn't it?

Yeah, but they ran into the most basic and expected issues and that's where it gets embarrassing. Lets take the App as an example

The App has the following requirements in order to work

- You need the App installed (iOS/Android only, not feature phones)

- You need an active internet connection (given the bad mobile coverage, that's not a given)

- You need to have your location services on if you're traveling

Using cell broadcasts, which were designed for such an exact scenario, reduces the requirements to

- Have a phone that supports cell broadcasts

Don't get me wrong, the NINA app is fine when it comes to more local alarms such as fire hazards or other accidents, but its really not suitable for a nationwide alarm.

Yes, this is disappointing. Take the Nokia 8114 4G feature-phone [1] for example: it does even have "Wireless Emergency Alert" (WEA) [2] configuration in its connectivity configuration screen. However Germany does not implement a WEA compliant notification scheme, and there is no way to install any of the warning apps on the Nokia 8114.

And then you forgot another requirement for the App to work

- the server that serves those messages needs to actually work (it failed during the test AFAIK)

"Embarrassing" is really the only word that adequately describes the current state of affairs.

[1] https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-8110-4g

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts

yea for some reason (money?) the agency thought that having ppl install one (or more) app (with sdk-trackers) is more disaster proof and privacy preserving than just sending a sms... with such friends, who needs enemies?

According to [1] it can take "several hours" to SMS a population of 300,000

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU-Alert#Location_based_SMS

i highly doubt that claim based on the fact that it was very common to recieve a dozen new years greetings sms within a few minutes after the new year had started.

apart from that i apologize for using the term 'sms' when i meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast

me and coworkers had the app (nina) and nothing happened... no message, nothing, if I opened the app also there, not a single text about some alarm. They should have used SMS

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