Do we have an emergency broadcast system in Ireland?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120072409#Comment_120072409

There is no functional system not was there one during Ophelia.

The system, as was (it was nearly entirely manual), relied on INN. INN are gone since 2009. Nothing has replaced it.

The Newstalk network distribution, which most stations do take, has (and uses) the ability to send an out of band signal that they are about to broadcast; but nobody has this set up to be able to take full control of output. And nobody would, as it would be incredibly dangerous - one finger slip taking every station off air!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120072717#Comment_120072717

To be fair, they do ... It's not 1995 and most people are available by mobile pretty much all the time and an SMS requires no data connection speed at all. Even a brief connection to an network will pick it up.

Mobile phone penetration is over 100% of the population and also includes all visitors to the country. It's at this stage an extreme exception not to have a mobile. Even most 90 year olds can manage it.

Also if a mass alert text message, like I donno .. incoming hurricane .. goes out to the entire population, you'll hear about it as the majority of the the people around you will have read it.

At this stage it's far more likely someone will be listening to Spotify or podcasts and not notice something on Radio 1 than it is that they'd not see a text alert.

If we were in a situation like Ukraine where there was a possibility of direct attacks on infrastructure, you'd probably want multiple AM stations and links to neighbouring states to carry message, but even there the mobile infrastructure has proven to be relatively resilient and also has bee able to be rolled out using temporary towers / towers on trucks and microwave links.

In something like an attack on the country (HIGHLY unlikely to ever occur), a centralised single radio mast is very likely to be targeted with a missile anyway.

In a modern war situation it's probably a lot easier to take out a handful of large radio transmitters with targeted missiles than it would be to take out a complex mesh of a mobile network with thousands of sites.

In my view an emergency alert system here would be far more useful if it were an opt in app type system for localised / types of useful information.

What would worry me a bit is the way you've seen Met Éireann colour alerts being perhaps a bit over done, particularly the yellow and orange ones. So, it could get a bit irritating if there were endless yellow alerts for ice or something unless you'd opted into getting those specifically.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have an emergency alert mechanism for broadcast radio, but it just seems like it's no longer the primary way to reach the widest number of people in the modern era.

What we should be doing though is hardening the mobile networks with adequate battery back up and all of that stuff.

CelticRambler

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120075760#Comment_120075760

To be fair, they do ... It's not 1995 and most people are available by mobile pretty much all the time and an SMS requires no data connection speed at all. Even a brief connection to an network will pick it up. 

Mobile phone penetration is over 100% of the population and also includes all visitors to the country. 

That's the kind of assumption that leads to bad system design. It's not just a question of whether or not you own a mobile phone, but also whether or not that phone is located in an area of coverage and whether the owner can/will see any message. I can tell you from first-hand experience that there is zero mobile coverage for any network in my sister's house. She lives in Dublin 16. Whenever we have a family event, it's only in the car on the way home, when we pass a particular roundabout that the phones of everyone in the car suddenly start pinging and chirping.

Similarly, I own a mobile (two, in fact so statistically I'm contributing to your "over 100%) but it does not play an important part in my daily life and regularly finds itself lost. The super-strong 4G signal is of no use from an emergency alert point of view, if I left the phone in the shed three days ago and haven't seen it since. I'm by no means unique in this regard - there are plenty of us for whom a mobile phone is a useful gadget, but not indispensible (and maybe not even desireable) in our daily lives.

One could apply the same logic to radio and TV broadcasts, to social media, or to any other form of mass messaging. Chances are a significant section of the population will not be consumers of one or more of those channels, so planning an emergency broadcast around a single point is a seriously flawed strategy. Furthermore, however effective sending a single text message to the population might be, for the reasons given by @Ger Roe the mobile phone network is one of the most vulnerable in the case of any on-going emergency.

I know of at least 3 households where there is no working FM or AM radio anymore. They don't listen to any radio other than maybe isn the car. I don't think our kitchen radio even works anymore.

There is quite literally universal penetration of mobile phones and all of them are capable of SMS reception and the vast majority are smartphones at this stage too. Ireland has universal mobile penetration. It's the only technology that you could regard as absolutely ubiquitous for communication. Not apps, not specific radio stations. An SMS sent as a broadcast will pop up on every device.

The arguments about phones being off or uncharged is exactly the same as the arguments for radios or TVs being off or not functioning. Radios aren't switched on to alert you of in coming messages either in normal circumstances and DAB+ is not going to happen here from what I can see, so that approach is rather irrelevant. Mobiles however will receive an SMS and alert you if they're on at all. You don't have to be actively listening to them.

You also have a growing population of people who may not speak English or Irish as their 1st language and may listen to very little Irish radio.

I would include the deaf community in that btw. There's a not insignificant number of people who audio broadcasts would be rather meaningless to.

If you've no signal in your house in suburban Dublin, that's more of a building materials issue than a lack of infrastructure though.

My argument is that if you want to have an emergency broadcasting system, in the modern era that starts with mobile SMS and uses radio as a passive backup. Non urgent warnings could be handled by an app, if there was a will to build one. It could even have things like an ability to locate yourself more easily to 112/999 or communicate in text form or even send images.

I wouldn't see any point in putting major money into physically building out any kind of EMB infrastructure for FM radio, beyond just coordinating with the broadcasters.

dxhound2005

We haven't had a big tsunami in Ireland since 1755, but in countries which do, I would vote for a system of sirens as well as radio and phones. Hard to ignore a siren like this. And these days people would turn to their phones or radios for more information after they had the good sense to run for the hills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxuVHwyg6aw

And of course in Ukraine today, nobody should depend on anything other than the good old air raid siren to be told when to head for the underground shelters.

The needs for an emergency broadcasting system in Ireland are relatively limited due to lack of extreme weather, seismic activities or likely military threats.

Really the only context we have for all out warnings are the very occasional extreme atlantic storm. Apart from that, most things come down to what amounts to weather updates that are handled by Met Éireann anyway.

If a cheap and cheerful app with push notifications were available for the non-emergency civil alerts / bad weather alerts etc it might be somewhat useful.

thesandeman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120076607#Comment_120076607

Not an app, but MapAlerter does a lot of the above. You can sign up for SMS alerts for your area as well as emails.

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120075760#Comment_120075760

What happens in the event of a blackout and the cell towers go down?

No backup generators on each tower.

brettmirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120075670#Comment_120075670

https://www.thejournal.ie/emergency-broadcast-system-3652284-Oct2017/

far from an idea system, and not in line with a lot of other country’s systems but better than nothing.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077887#Comment_120077887

That was 100% manual intervention by each broadcaster.

An actual system would not need manual intervention.

Ger Roe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120078056#Comment_120078056

Correct, it was totally manual with far too many steps, each prone to potential failure.

When 'the system' was tested for radio in 2008, each station had to designate some contact names and numbers, to be called in priority order. As far as I remember, the first person who answered the call and accepted the mission, then had an hour to get to the station and slide up a fader from the INN satellite feed, which was playing out an audio tone. No on air announcement about emergency tests was to be made made and there was no actual message broadcast, no explanation was to be given, beyond 'an engineering test' (if anyone asked). The tone signal originated from the media studio in Leinster House and it had to be relayed for a specified minimum time. The call to action went out one day in the late night/early morning hours and BAI staff monitored each station to ensure compliance.

I was going to nominate myself as a designated contact, but I lived outside the station franchise area and I might not have been able to make it to the studio at the time. I contacted the BAI and asked if the nominated contacts could be given an official ID/authorisation document to present to any Garda that might stop them while wandering about Dublin city in the wee hours on their 'national emergency' mission, but they did not reply to me. I pointed out that in the event of a real emergency, there might be roadblocks and restricted movement checkpoints that would have to be dealt with by the appointed fader slider uppers. Our duly activated station nominee actually lived relatively near to the studio and got out of bed to cycle in and push up the fader ..... very high tech.

It was all kept very quiet and nothing more was communicated to the stations as to how effective it was, or what it would mean going forward. Eamonn Ryan was Minister for Comms at the time and he did announce how apparently successful it was. As has been mentioned, INN closed shortly after so the distribution method used, even one so manually dependent, was then no longer available.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30390733.html

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120077686#Comment_120077686

There’s 30 - 60 mins of battery on most of them and the core sites have contingencies like generators.

The same issues apply to the VDSL landline, very small telephone exchanges (remote units in cabinets) and services over cable broadband btw. They’re battery backed up in the cabinets. The pure fibre networks are passive optical networks, so have very few power issues, once you’ve a battery back up in your house. If you’re somewhere rural you really should have a UPS to keep your router alive in an outage.

There are risks to many small FM and UHF relays btw in a prolonged blackout. A short one wouldn’t bother most infrastructure. Anything going on for more than a few hours might.

I would advocate the state should mandate the maintenance of a single AM station, probably carrying RTE R1 as an absolute backup. Not sure about Long Wave though. It’s not widely supported by enough basic radios. They still have masts, just putting a small amount of defence funding into it would be a sensible precaution in the event of an absolute disaster. It’s highly, highly unlikely to be needed ever, but it does seem like a civil defence oriented simple AM system might not be a terrible idea.

The mobile and landline networks should be assessed for storm and blackout protection though. Seems like a sensible precaution.

There’s also nothing wrong with a manual broadcast protocol - with a known way of contacting the local radio newsrooms. It doesn’t have to be anything horrendously complex - for example a central emergency office calling them with a known landline and mobile number and dispatching info over the syndicated news feed networks.

brettmirl

This is from 2018 - an EU wide "Reverse 911"

https://twitter.com/EUCouncil/status/1061965932325675012

Never heard anything about it ever since.

saabsaab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/80792587#Comment_80792587

No it's the Greeks that started it.

The Continental Op

Long wave is the way to do it but as has already been mentioned a lot of households don't have a radio anymore let alone one that receives Long Wave. Plus of course RTE would love to stop Long Wave transmissions.