Emergency alert is in St-Elzéar-de-Bonaventure
We all got an emergency alert for St‑Elzéar‑de‑Bonaventure. Fagstein helpfully tweeted “Saint‑Elzéar‑de‑Bonaventure is a 9-hour-43-minute drive from Montreal.”
The town is 867 km from Montreal, practically in New Brunswick, and has a population of 464.
Stay indoors!
Blork 17:14 on 2022-09-02 Permalink
My sweetie was in a large store when it went off. She said it was a crazy scene with dozens of people around her all buzzing at the same time, and all of them looking around, bewildered.
Josh 17:26 on 2022-09-02 Permalink
This happens in the territories, too. The few times we have had emergency alerts in the Yukon, it doesn’t matter where you are in the territory, and whether the alert is limited to a community hours and hours away, your phone will go nuts. I figured this was a problem limited to us up here.
Chris 22:23 on 2022-09-02 Permalink
These alarms for far-away things are not merely silly, they can do more harm that good. My friend that works in hospital emerg tells me that there’s often someone that literally get hurts, her last example is someone that was climbing a ladder and got frightened by the alarm noise and fell off the ladder and broke a bone.
Kate 15:15 on 2022-09-03 Permalink
There’s also simply the crying wolf aspect. If people get used to the idea that the alert doesn’t mean “pay attention, this is important” then they won’t be paying attention when they actually should.
CE 21:41 on 2022-09-03 Permalink
The constant use of the emergency tone for amber alerts makes the tone completely useless. I was out on my balcony and heard my phone making the sound. Since it’s pretty much always an amber alert, I didn’t think there was any reason to check it right away (how am I going to find an abducted kid while out painting my rear fire escape?) But what if there were bombs flying towards us or a tornado about to touch down? Such warnings require immediate action and shouldn’t be mixed with things that are either not emergencies, or are emergencies but so far away as to be completely irrelevant.