Early warning signals

If you see people running, you run too 🙂

I think a lot of countries still have sirens. I am old enough to remember sirens in most school yards and drills for ?? not a clue what they were for. I haven't seen a siren in years in Southern Ontario.

Sault Ste. Marie still has a siren system made up of a few "air raid type" sirens throughout the city. I don't know if they are still in service but they still did annual tests on them back in the late 90's. No way of missing those things...

Elmira has an emergency plan in place which for a municipality I think is quite simple but effective. They have a "siren" mounted on the "city hall." its tested once a week, every week at noon on Saturday. You can't miss it...it's loud..lol.
Also, they have a phone registry. You sign up through there website, or by phoning them to give them your number. Any emergencies including major events that will effect the town like a chemical spill, power outage, tornado, alien invasion, etc. they send out an automated message recorded by the fire chief, or building official or someone in the chain of the town's emerg. planning. We registered our home number but also our cell phones. We don't get the call often, but have had a few including when the ice storm hit earlier, when the local chemical plant had a spill, etc.

Anyone remember those "civil defense" tests on the TV back in the day? Now that you started this thread...I havn't seen one of those in years. do they still do them? do we have a civil defense that has a plan now that the threat of a cold war has largely disappeared? Aside from the local newscasters, what is the obligation of the government to transmit info to the population at large? What process is in place? Good question Naka!

I was wondering how they would communicate such situations as boil orders. Seems like not too many people are still listening to the radio at home anymore, so a radio announcement may not the the best way to reach all of the town's citizens. I've signed up (for a day) with the Alberta EMO for text messages, but its essentially a twitter message sent to your phone in text message format. In the span of an hour, I had received a dozen messages that were all irrelevant so I cancelled it. Interesting question to ask Naka....