Yesterday, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Alaska triggered a tsunami warning in the middle of the night for those along the British Columbia coast, including numerous communities on Vancouver Island.
Despite warnings on radio, many residents were asleep during notifications, even during the text and phone notifications sent out in Sidney, North Saanich and Victoria. These alerting systems only send out notifications if users register for them, as they are not wireless based.
City of Victoria Emergency Program Coordinator Tanya Patterson, told CHEK “We sent it out to specific neighbourhoods that were in the tsunami inundation zone so just the coastal areas. We didn’t send it to all areas of Victoria if some people are wondering why they didn’t get the alert.”
With many iOS users enabling Do Not Disturb during bedtime hours, emergency text messages are silenced by default. Most residents woke up to text alert warnings–from concerned friends and relatives instead.
Add in "what's app messages" from Brazil to your collection of notification practices! We are hosting a student from Brazil and I actually first heard about all the activity from his mom IN BRAZIL who sent me a very concerned text!
— wendy swan (@WSwanVictoria) January 23, 2018
But that is changing, as Emergency Management BC Executive Director Chris Duffy said “We will be moving to a wireless public alerting system later this year and of course that will take some time to test and roll out as the alert ready tool did.”
The Alert Ready system will be up and running in April 2018, as the CRTC will require all cell providers to allow LTE push alerts to be sent out to devices in geographic areas of danger. But there are some downsides, as it will only work with phones capable of LTE wireless signals and in rural or remote areas with no signal, the system won’t function.
Officials in Victoria noted close to 35,000 people have signed up to Vic-Alerts, as of yesterday morning, after originally only having 6,400 registered prior to the tsunami warning.
In the meantime, here are links to sign up for text and phone alerts for those in Greater Victoria and other island residents:
There is one way to bypass Do Not Disturb in iOS on your iPhone, so you will get alerted no matter what from any contact. It’s somewhat hard to find but it is possible, so share it with your friends and family.
Just launch Contacts and select the person or number, then tap ‘Edit’. Scroll down to Ringtone, tap it, then toggle ‘Emergency Bypass’ to ON. This will allow “sounds and vibrations” even when DND is on.
For those living along the B.C. coastline, this latest tsunami warning event is a good reminder to ensure you have emergency supplies at home.
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Thanks and done!
North Shore is here: http://nsem.info/get-prepared/sign-emergency-notifications
Thanks for the hint about the Emergency Bypass within a contact’s ring and text tones. I knew about the “Allow calls from ” within the DND settings itself but like the label implies, that doesn’t work for text tones.
Darn it… Read up on Emergency Bypass, and it ignores the silent/vibration switch setting, not just the DND setting. It is well and truly just for actual emergency calls/texts.
Almost three years ago, in Seattle, I got alerts from the authorities there on my visiting mobile phone from Canada, they sent something called a “flash SMS”. I have subsequently seen it many more times, for tornado alerts etc. in other states. I’m pretty sure it uses the SMS notification to every mobile phone in the area – 3G, 4G….why we don’t have something like this, I don’t know…..
I think it just dumb u have to have LTE signal to get the alarts there is some phone that are 3g too ???