I wonder how many people are killed per alert?<p>These alerts (usually AMBER alerts) are sent to millions of people, accompanied by a loud and startling siren.<p>You can imagine all sorts of "one-in-a-million" events. The surgeon woken in the middle of the night, who can't get back to sleep and makes a mistake the next day. The startled roofer falling off a ladder. Etc.
It's pretty clear that the current Ontario emergency alert system doesn't have enough checks.<p>They need to pause the whole system and add in an external approval before messages are sent out.<p>Also everything is sent out at the "Presidential Alert Level". Presumably because someone gave the contract to their cousin.
Reminds me an accident which was caused in Hawaii by bad UI and following rather funny examples of how can bad UI screw things up: <a href="https://gfycat.com/blog/hawaii-missile-gifs-alert-terrible-ui/" rel="nofollow">https://gfycat.com/blog/hawaii-missile-gifs-alert-terrible-u...</a>
Because of this alert I actually learned that Ontario Power Generation and the city of Toronto offer free Potassium Iodine pills to anyone living within 50km of the reactor in case of a radiation leak:<p><a href="https://preparetobesafe.ca" rel="nofollow">https://preparetobesafe.ca</a>
The initial alert happened at 7:24 aim.<p>Between 8:06 am and 9:12 am a number of government officials, starting with the Pickering Fire Chief via CP24 [0] started announcing that the alert was sent in error.<p>At 9:12 am we were told the alert was sent by mistake via the alert system.<p>At 12:55 pm we were finally told that there actually was no nuclear incident, and the alert was sent by accident during training [1].<p>Why the hell did it take 42 minutes for <i>any</i> sort of public information to be broadcast after the initial alert.<p>Why the hell did it take an additional hour and 6 minutes to realize they should send that information through the official system, instead of letting people wonder what information is accurate and what information is caused by the fog of war. Note that the same places we were told it was a mistake were previously telling us people were responding to an incident [2].<p>Why the hell did it take an entire 6 hours after the alert for the authorities to inform us that there hadn't actually been a nuclear accident, instead of a nuclear accident that was contained enough they didn't feel the need to alert us via emergency systems?<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/CP24/status/1216345708971929600" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/CP24/status/1216345708971929600</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ontario.ca/mcscs/en/2020/01/statement-from-the-solicitor-general.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ontario.ca/mcscs/en/2020/01/statement-from-the-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/CP24/status/1216337813957947393" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/CP24/status/1216337813957947393</a>
Even if it was not a mistake, why would they send a presedential alert to the entire province just to tell them that people 10km away from the nuclear plant are in no danger? Pretty absurd, wish I could fully disable these alerts until the government is actually competently using them.
Reminder to check out this amazing, heroic story of this man: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov</a>