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.
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.
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.
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.
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 -.-
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.
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?
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.
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
> In the future, the government plans on making the tests an annual event, designating September 10 as emergency alarm test day.
That's factually incorrect. The nationwide alarm test day is designated to be the 2nd Thursday of September - the actual date will naturally differ from year to to year.
Please don't use the code tags for quoting. It makes it very hard to read on mobile and in case it's a longer sentence the overflow is non-obvious on a bigger screen too.
The degree to which it didn't work is a bit embarassing, and it seems like many of the issues could have been easily identified in advance so that this big test run could help identify more subtle problems.
I still don't know why Cell Broadcast isn't employed, even through it would solve a lot of the problems of using an app. Someone on reddit wrote the BBK and their answer effectively stated that it isn't used because it isn't used.
In the Spiegel article they cited privacy issues (apparently the app doesn't have that...) which was later changed to "the big telecoms in Germany don't offer that service".
Fefe has a post (in German) about that, and the first excuse was uttered by someone in a high position who despite his job title apparently knew nothing about what he was talking about, and that the paragraph with the excuse got changed, after "the censor returned from peeing":
In Germany, unfortunately "something about privacy" seems to have become the default argument against anything that a party either can't or doesn't want to implement for one reason or another.
Strangely enough, privacy concerns are rarely raised when it comes to paper-based processes or obsolete technologies such as fax, which authorities still feel comfortable with.
Just to clarify for everyone not familiar with how cell broadcast works: It's entirely passive/unacknowledged, much like IP multicast on a local link (without IGMP).
The risk it poses to users' privacy is about the same as that of an FM radio receiver.
European countries are lagging behind with cell broadcast, even though it's perfectly compatible with GDPR and most local legislation. But AFAIK it's going to be mandatory EU-wide starting in 2022.
I personally do not feel eager to install an app that very likely was written by the lowest bidder. Especially when the underlying requirements were written by our politicians, best case we have complete incompetence, worst case someone saw a way to make the bundestrojaner look harmless.
I have three of those apps installed, none of them did anything that day. They've mostly worked in the past, except when larger areas were notified and you clicked on the notification to get more details the app would show nothing because whatever its service is running on was overwhelmed by the amount of people checking..
Meantime vacationing in Japan I can get a Japanese wall of text on my phone informing me and everyone around me who pulled out their phone of an imminent earthquake, all without data active.
Totally agree. I really struggle to remember any public software project overseen by the government which wasn't dominated by total incompetence... Bundestrojaner, Corona-App, Nina-App, Immigration database, Official's backups and not to mention the entire infrastructure of police, military and emergency services.
There is just no sign of improvement.
Nothing, absolutely nothing surprises me about that. Public Infrastructure in the disaster management system is a - disaster.
Example: Yes, my home village and the surrounding 20-30 Villages all have their old air-raid sirens to notify the members of the fire brigade. A system which is quite old and was rock solid reliable. During the transistion from analog radio to digital radio, the receivers were upgraded to be triggered by digital radio (TETRA to be precise). This, we found out, now means that during a power outage, there is no way to alert the fire brigade because the sirens dont have power. We now have people sitting in the fire station again whenever our Village has a power out to use the on-vehicle radio to communicate with the dispatch.
TETRA itself is also a disaster. And even worse: Its not even universally accepted. This means that local muncipalities can decide to stay with the old analog system while others have the new digital one.
In theory, the digital one has a bazillion advantages. However, all of those advantages in the end create more problems than they solve.
For example, better voice quality - just leads to people being completely not understandable when using breathing masks to enter a building (Something to do with filtering).
Also, analog fails gracefully. Digital stops working. And it stops working a lot earlier. This means, you now have to use a repeater at the entrance of a building to talk to people in the building, because the digital radio often does not work. This happens mostly in direct (Walkie Talkie Mode)
When in cellular mode, good luck finding a signal in 50% of the rural areas - This mode is vital to talk to the dispatcher to call for support/additional units.
The whole system is supposed to be used by everyone. Military, Federal and Local Police, Fire Brigade, EMT... which means there has to be a rights management system to access certain channels. This is hardcoded into every device. This often means that a device does not have the permission to cooperate or that only the one device of the commander can access certain channels.
There is a 2 Second delay between pressing the talk button and a connection being established due to the encoding and permission management leading to people often having to resend because the first words were cut off.
Its just a complete and abject failure everywhere. And you can look wherever you want, and its the same. Working things get rationalized, or "modernized", resulting in a less capable, more expensive, more complex system.
Or, in our case, to carry two devices, one digital and one analog.
I'm not involved in this, but like any other citizen, I rely on this system.
This shows that some people who carry certain responsibilities haven't lived up to their task, and without this test, we wouldn't have gotten to know this, while they would still have collected their paycheck as if everything is ok.
The lesson to be learned from this should be to implement a monthly test run, like other countries are doing.
55 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadFor 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.
I really expected much more from this test. Feels like we are living in an underdeveloped country.
To be fair, this is pretty much the definition of 1st world problems.
However, even voluntarily fire brigades usually use beepers instead of sirens nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
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 -.-
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.
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU-Alert#Location_based_SMS
apart from that i apologize for using the term 'sms' when i meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast
That's factually incorrect. The nationwide alarm test day is designated to be the 2nd Thursday of September - the actual date will naturally differ from year to to year.
This is just sloppy journalism.
http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a72533
Strangely enough, privacy concerns are rarely raised when it comes to paper-based processes or obsolete technologies such as fax, which authorities still feel comfortable with.
The risk it poses to users' privacy is about the same as that of an FM radio receiver.
Meantime vacationing in Japan I can get a Japanese wall of text on my phone informing me and everyone around me who pulled out their phone of an imminent earthquake, all without data active.
Example: Yes, my home village and the surrounding 20-30 Villages all have their old air-raid sirens to notify the members of the fire brigade. A system which is quite old and was rock solid reliable. During the transistion from analog radio to digital radio, the receivers were upgraded to be triggered by digital radio (TETRA to be precise). This, we found out, now means that during a power outage, there is no way to alert the fire brigade because the sirens dont have power. We now have people sitting in the fire station again whenever our Village has a power out to use the on-vehicle radio to communicate with the dispatch.
TETRA itself is also a disaster. And even worse: Its not even universally accepted. This means that local muncipalities can decide to stay with the old analog system while others have the new digital one. In theory, the digital one has a bazillion advantages. However, all of those advantages in the end create more problems than they solve.
For example, better voice quality - just leads to people being completely not understandable when using breathing masks to enter a building (Something to do with filtering).
Also, analog fails gracefully. Digital stops working. And it stops working a lot earlier. This means, you now have to use a repeater at the entrance of a building to talk to people in the building, because the digital radio often does not work. This happens mostly in direct (Walkie Talkie Mode)
When in cellular mode, good luck finding a signal in 50% of the rural areas - This mode is vital to talk to the dispatcher to call for support/additional units.
The whole system is supposed to be used by everyone. Military, Federal and Local Police, Fire Brigade, EMT... which means there has to be a rights management system to access certain channels. This is hardcoded into every device. This often means that a device does not have the permission to cooperate or that only the one device of the commander can access certain channels.
There is a 2 Second delay between pressing the talk button and a connection being established due to the encoding and permission management leading to people often having to resend because the first words were cut off.
Its just a complete and abject failure everywhere. And you can look wherever you want, and its the same. Working things get rationalized, or "modernized", resulting in a less capable, more expensive, more complex system.
Or, in our case, to carry two devices, one digital and one analog.
I'm not involved in this, but like any other citizen, I rely on this system.
This shows that some people who carry certain responsibilities haven't lived up to their task, and without this test, we wouldn't have gotten to know this, while they would still have collected their paycheck as if everything is ok.
The lesson to be learned from this should be to implement a monthly test run, like other countries are doing.