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Comment by milgrim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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