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My wife is going to live, and I am going to die

At 1:55 p.m., Wednesday, May 8, the alert went out. It was a test of the new Alert Ready nationwide emergency alert system. At the time, I was sitting in my basement office, with my SaskTel iPhone 6s on my desk right in front of me.
Brian Zinchuk

At 1:55 p.m., Wednesday, May 8, the alert went out. It was a test of the new Alert Ready nationwide emergency alert system. At the time, I was sitting in my basement office, with my SaskTel iPhone 6s on my desk right in front of me. My wife, Michelle, was nine feet above me and about 10 feet over.

She got the alert. I did not. My wife is going to live, and I am going to die.

That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? If you are being sent a for-real message, it is because you might die if you do not heed its warning.

I just hope it’s reserved for only the absolute most dire emergencies. As in, you should hear it maybe only once in your lifetime. I understand they might use it for amber alerts. I think there has to be a line somewhere. There has to be a tornado at your doorstep, not just a warning. Nuclear war. Tsunami. Earthquake. Alien invasion. That’s it.

I sent SaskTel a chat message a half hour later. They responded, “Thank you for your inquiry and response. Just to let you know. You need to be on LTE to receive the alert. If you are on UMTS or Wi-Fi, you will not receive it, so please confirm this.”

To which I responded, “Well what the hell use is an alert system if it only works in Regina and Saskatoon?

“If North Korea, Russia or China decides to lob nuclear missiles at Minot and the 150 surrounding missile silos around it, including one 50 km from my house, shouldn’t I get an alert?”

They replied, “We are sorry to hear that. Thank you for your inquiry and your response. We understand your frustration. Looks like the reason is because of iOS 10.3.3, you need to have iOS 11.3 or higher.

“We apologize for any inconvenience. For more information please see: https://bit.ly/2G1QFk7”

It turns out my lack of updating my phone may secure my untimely demise. Curse you Apple. Your iOS updates apparently aren’t insistent enough that I update my software. It should be reminding me every 20 seconds instead of every 60 seconds.

It could also have been that my wife got a LTE signal upstairs, while I get just 3G downstairs.

So I looked up their link, which said, “Federal, provincial and territorial governments are responsible for issuing emergency alerts.

“Federally, emergency alerts are issued most frequently by Environment and Climate Change Canada.

“Each provincial or territorial government decides who will have the authority to issue alerts within their jurisdictions. For example, emergency alerts could be issued by provincial or territorial emergency management offices, or in some cases, by municipal emergency management offices or local police and fire departments.”

Further investigation found that it does appear to be largely limited, but does not include alien invasion.

However, amber alert is indeed on there. And that, I think, is a mistake.

Amber alerts are a serious consideration. However, with social media and every other avenue already available and flooding everyone with amber alert messages (often for days, long after it has passed), sending a heart-stopping alert to everyone’s cellphones is a bad idea. Amber alerts are relatively frequent, unlike the other perils that are listed as warranting alerts, like flash floods, tornado or hurricanes.

I fear we run the risk of crying wolf too often, of people becoming jaded to it.

Case in point: Hawaii, Jan. 13, 2018. A similar alert was sent out to cellphones in Hawaii, warning, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

It wasn’t a drill, but it was a false alarm, one that opened many eyes and frightened many more to tears. With the rising tensions with nuclear-armed North Korea peaking around that time, there was enough probability that it was the real deal to be terrifying. So what happens if another alert like that goes out – except a real one? Will anyone take shelter? Will they think it’s real?

I don’t know if that foul-up prompted the new alert system in Canada. If it did, kudos to those who got if off the ground in such short order. But if not, testing it was a good idea, so the bugs could be worked out.

My wife didn’t bother to tell me the world was ending when she got her alert. I wonder if that was a mysterious happening or intentional? I don’t know if I want to know.

— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net