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Originally Posted by CityTech
Even for natural disasters the alert system is too broad. I got a tornado warning alert in the summer and when I checked the weather alert online, I saw that I was 40km beyond the edge of the square shown on the map. They should have only given it out to people inside that square.
With this, and amber alerts, it's clear the logic the system uses is "if there's the slightest chance this DEFCON 1 warning would help, send it out". This is counterproductive because it leads to alarm fatigue. To get people to keep taking them seriously, they need to be used very sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. Not all the time "just in case".
Here's an example: When the big earthquake in BC happens, the alert ready system will let people know about 3 minutes before it starts (the earliest possible). 3 minutes to get into shelter. If it happens at 3am, with the way the system is currently set up, everyone is just going to think "oh, another amber alert, fuck it I'll just check it in the morning". And then they'll die.
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I was back living temporarily in London during the first half of 2020 and we had a tornado warning for London-Middlesex-Oxford one night - and a tornado actually did hit outside Belmont. There was a warning on my phone, and I'm glad I heard it - but it was the same level of alarm that is used for Amber Alerts thousands of kilometres away.
Meanwhile there was absolutely no alert in Nova Scotia this past April when a gunman was terrorizing multiple communities and over 20 people were killed. That would have been a perfect use of the alert system, but the RCMP chose to post about it on Twitter, which many Nova Scotians do not use. Some Nova Scotians got information about the threat from US authorities before any domestic authorities.
I feel as though there have been fewer Amber Alerts this year than during 2018 and 2019, possibly because of the pandemic, but once things return to some sort of normal I wouldn't be surprised if abductions increase again. And it will be important that there is some distinction between the two types of events.