Public emergency alerts by text in the UK

[Basil]

Surely these are warnings of an imminent danger.
I don't expect it to say 'you are currently being lashed by a destructive storm'.  Therefore I assume the mast would still be working.
For a while.

[Flite]

It's pretty easy to repair a downed power line.  It's basically impossible to repair dozens of them on the same day when half the roads are blocked by trees or flooding - and you don't know which half because communications are a mess.

Made worse by infrastructure that's 50 years old, so spares are no longer available to make a quick repair, and whole sections have to be rebuilt. The engineers drafted in from other regions had never seen anything like it - so much obsolete equipment. And miles of rotten wooden poles.

arrange delivery of more diesel after day n

In our case, drive 40 miles to a fuel station with diesel pumps working with a can for diesel to keep the genny going for a few hours, and take cash because the card machines won't work, and don't even think about getting money from an ATP or cash backfrom a shop - they are all shut due to the lack of power.

Once the masts are out, it's a bit late to be telling people about what's already hit them

But it could help with managing the aftermath
It was 4-5 days before anyone "official" came to see if we were OK (two over-70s)
As FE has mentioned, after several days they sent a food wagon into the village, but no-one knew about it.
The storm hit overnight - in the morning no-one had any communications.

[Flite]

Rural areas are often served by large established cells on proper radio towers, with a shed that can be filled with batteries and/or diseasel gensets

I am told that the only mast that serves our area does have a back up genny. But it's up on the fell, and in bad weather no-one can get up there to start it or refil it.

We knew the storm was coming, we pay attention to the met office, but the infrastructure was not able to mitigate the effects.

[Beardy]

There will be limited infrastructure on long term UPS with a more widely distributed infra on short term UPS. However, in the event of serious issues or emergencies are in play a service priority will kick in with selected people and services having continued connectivity and the rest of us being cut off.

 In olden days (ie, when I was a baby telephone engineer) service preference key bypass’ were hard wired into certain phone circuits and when the preference keys were thrown everyone but those few got cut off. There’s days I suspect that service providers maintain a list of numbers to remain in service and the rest will be denied.

[mrcharly-YHT]

in a real-life emergency like Storm Arwen, all the electric will go off so the mobile phone masts won't work and no-one will get any calls or texts whatsoever.

Actually many masts continue functioning. They have either a battery or generator backup.

The one that provides me with a signal worked for 48hours after we lost power in the storms in 2022.

I suspect that it doesn't work so well anymore though, because last time we lost power the phones went down after about 1hr.

[Flite]

If you scroll up, I explained what happened here a few posts ago.

[Giraffe]

My Alcatel 3 doesn't seem to have a setting for such alerts, or it's so buried in menus that I'll be past needing it by the time that I find it.
I'm going into the settings - I might be some time.

[Pickled Onion]

I had no idea these things existed until I got one:



I don't speak Romanian, but I got the gist from the word "Urs", and the fact that I was at that moment trying to sidle away from a family of bears that was plodding down the DN7 right towards me. The noise of the alert made me jump, it was very loud, but thankfully I was wearing headphones and it didn't alert the bears to my presence.

[Kim]

And there's pretty good cellular coverage in Surrey...  It all becomes clear.

[Kim]

It's pretty easy to repair a downed power line.  It's basically impossible to repair dozens of them on the same day when half the roads are blocked by trees or flooding - and you don't know which half because communications are a mess.

Made worse by infrastructure that's 50 years old, so spares are no longer available to make a quick repair, and whole sections have to be rebuilt. The engineers drafted in from other regions had never seen anything like it - so much obsolete equipment. And miles of rotten wooden poles.

That sums up the underlying issue.  Long-term lack of capital investment, because we insist on running critical infrastructure as a business rather than a service.

[Basil]

Interesting.  Some people may need to have a hidden phone.
From twitter

On Apr 23rd, the UK government will test emergency alerts, & your phone could make a loud sound, even on silent. If you’re a domestic violence survivor & have a hidden phone, it could reveal its location. Refuge have created a guide for turning alerts off.

[Kim]

Interesting.  Some people may need to have a hidden phone.
From twitter

On Apr 23rd, the UK government will test emergency alerts, & your phone could make a loud sound, even on silent. If you’re a domestic violence survivor & have a hidden phone, it could reveal its location. Refuge have created a guide for turning alerts off.

A nasty unforeseen consequence of playing catch-up.  If phones had all done this from the outset, it wouldn't be an issue because people would understand the emergency alert settings the way they understand the normal ring and vibrate settings.  (Not that I'm entirely sure what's going on with volume controls in whatever incarnation of Android it is that I'm currently using, but if I was trying to conceal the phone, I'd be damn sure to make the effort to do so.)

[rogerzilla]

Well that's the plot of Doctor Foster fux0red, then.

Also, drug dealers with several burner phones are going to become quite irritated

[Cudzoziemiec]

It's pretty easy to repair a downed power line.  It's basically impossible to repair dozens of them on the same day when half the roads are blocked by trees or flooding - and you don't know which half because communications are a mess.

Made worse by infrastructure that's 50 years old, so spares are no longer available to make a quick repair, and whole sections have to be rebuilt. The engineers drafted in from other regions had never seen anything like it - so much obsolete equipment. And miles of rotten wooden poles.

In Britain, the wooden poles are fixed directly into the ground. In some countries, they're mounted on short concrete bases. I don't know how effective this is but I presume the intention is to stop them rotting from the ground up.

[Kim]

It's pretty easy to repair a downed power line.  It's basically impossible to repair dozens of them on the same day when half the roads are blocked by trees or flooding - and you don't know which half because communications are a mess.

Made worse by infrastructure that's 50 years old, so spares are no longer available to make a quick repair, and whole sections have to be rebuilt. The engineers drafted in from other regions had never seen anything like it - so much obsolete equipment. And miles of rotten wooden poles.

In Britain, the wooden poles are fixed directly into the ground. In some countries, they're mounted on short concrete bases. I don't know how effective this is but I presume the intention is to stop them rotting from the ground up.

More likely it's to do with whether the ground is stable and conducive to having poles poked into it, but some countries do seem to eschew wood in favour of concrete for poles.

[Beardy]

There were some trials of hollow GRP poles a number of years back, the idea being that the engineer didn’t need to climb the pole for installation and maintenance of circuits. They obviously didn’t catch on as most new poles I’ve seen of late have been wood. I’ve climbed wooden poles that have been 50 or 60 years old, so they can be remarkably resilient, especially those older poles that were pressure treated with creosote.

[Cudzoziemiec]

What I've seen elsewhere were not concrete poles but wooden poles bolted to short concrete bases.

[Beardy]

A telephone pole typically has about 30% of its total length in the ground, so I’d expect a concrete plinth to be about half the length of the pole, unless it’s a fully stayed pole of course.

[rogerzilla]

A telephone pole typically has about 30% of its total length in the ground

I tell the ladies something similar.

[Kim]

A telephone pole typically has about 30% of its total length in the ground, so I’d expect a concrete plinth to be about half the length of the pole, unless it’s a fully stayed pole of course.

Or perhaps some sort of floating slab arrangement?  (ie. a wide but relatively shallow slab that stays put on unstable ground by displacement)

[cygnet]

Cheaper to bury a longer pole I'd expect unless the soil is particularly soft, or aggressive.
(the 2/3rds out 1/3rd in is common for stuff cantilevering out of the ground)

Wide and shallow can require more engineering, and impact on routing of other nearby buried services.

Bolting the base of a timber pole to a concrete plinth sounds unusually complicated, with more potential failure points.

Maybe the concrete is cast around the timber to provide additional robustness e.g. impact protection?

[quixoticgeek]

Says the city dweller.

It's right and proper that services should be related to population density. Out in the wilds, we're on our own.

In which case you've made appropriate preparations for eventualities right? 2 weeks food for each resident. Generator with enough fuel, starlink connection in case the wires go down? that sort of thing?

Not true, some mobile infra should be on UPS power.

I assume you were not impacted by Storm Arwen?
Our area was without electricity for a week (and some much longer)
I can assure you we had no mobile signal, no e-mails, no internet.
Only the old land line phone worked, and very poor FM radio reception on a battery radio.
Phoning powergrid and waiting for an hour or so resulted in a message to visit the website.

It was a shock to realise how reliant we have become on modern communication systems.
Sasdly, I fear the rural population will never be well served.

If the storm has arrived, it's too late to be sending out the emergency notifications.

I suspect it's trending to the other way round.  Rural areas are often served by large established cells on proper radio towers, with a shed that can be filled with batteries and/or diseasel gensets (though I suspect properly redundant power is limited to those sites which are primarily for broadcast TV/radio).  Whereas these days the urban ones are on tops of buildings and crammed in anywhere they can stick a suspiciously chunky lamp post without the NIMBY conspiraloons noticing.

Of course, the flip side of that is that rural areas are at the mercy of topography, and those sites last in the queueuueue for technology upgrades, particularly where the backhaul would need upgrading.

I remember touring BT's emergency equipment facilities many years ago. They had a number of trailer mounted generators they could deliver to a site that was without power. Alas not enough for every site, but can get some of them up.

Once the masts are out, it's a bit late to be telling people about what's already hit them

Exactly.

J

[Kim]

I remember touring BT's emergency equipment facilities many years ago. They had a number of trailer mounted generators they could deliver to a site that was without power. Alas not enough for every site, but can get some of them up.

I talked Vodafone into helping with my GSCE geography project.  That would have been 1995 or so.  As part of a fun day out surveying signal strength^[1] and paying with their GIS software, we visited my local (rural, on the top of a hill with a good view of the M25) cell site, which was of the proper tower with a brick building at the base style.  In classic telephone exchange style half the space was taken up by lead-acid batteries, and the rest was split between air conditioning equipment and racks crammed with RF voodoo I didn't understand.  Except for one sparsely-populated rack at the end: That was for the newfangled GSM network, and had more call capacity than the rest put together.

There wasn't a generator on site, but they had provision for parking and quickly connecting one.

It's probably safe to say that they don't build them like that any more.


_{[1] Using, amongst other things, a GPS receiver.  It could pinpoint your location to within a hundred metres!}

[Mr Larrington]

Building them like that any more wouldn’t enhance shareholder value.

[quixoticgeek]

Building them like that any more wouldn’t enhance shareholder value.

This s a big problem for many organisations. 99% of the time it's not cost effective to spend money on making it that little bit extra resilient. The remaining 1% gets expensive, fast. It's a gamble, and most in the C suite take the gamble that it'll happen when the next person has taken over...

I've trained in emergency response when I lived in the UK, and I've been working on high availability systems design since the last millennium. I frequently get told I'm paranoid. I sometimes get to say I told you so.

I've seen a lot of companies doing disaster recovery exercises, and they are almost always a disaster. COVID has made clear that a lot of organisations have a very poor bus factor (number of staff you can hit with a bus before you can no longer operate). I know that in the safe at work there is an envelope marked "only to be opened in the event of Julia's Death". Because someone has to be able to pick up my tasks.

We've seen what happens when Facebook break their network and discovered that everything was dependent on it. Partly cos "eat your own dog food" and partly cos "it should never fail". I spend far too much of my working life asking what if, and what do we do to minimise the impact.

The phone network is a critical safety system, and maintaining that level of service really should not be at the whim of share holders value.

J