The air raid siren that warns of disasters or calamities will disappear at the end of next year. A notification on the mobile phone, the so-called NL-Alert, will take over the warning function, outgoing Minister of Justice Dilan Yesilgöz (VVD) wrote earlier this week in a letter to the House of Representatives. The siren, which must warn people of disasters or calamities, offers “few advantages” compared to mobile notification and from the end of next year it will no longer be tested monthly. In fact, it “can hardly boast of great successes.”
The so-called Warning and Alarm System has been in place since 1998. The 4,200 alarm posts throughout the Netherlands are still tested every first Monday of the month at 12 noon. In the best case, writes Yesilgöz, this air raid siren can be heard by 75 percent of all residents of the Netherlands. This makes it less effective than the NL-Alert, which has been in existence since 2012. During the last measurement, last December, this would have reached 92 percent of all Dutch people aged 12 and older.
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The NL-Alert is not only used nationally, but also by the regional Safety Regions. Since 2012, the notification has been sent 538 times, an average of 54 times per year. The air raid siren has been used much less often: about 36 times since 1998, only twice in the past five years. Research shows that the air raid siren is considered “too strong a means of alarming people” for Safety Regions.
The continued existence of air sirens has been discussed for years, ever since the NL-Alert emerged. It has not yet been abolished, because the mobile notification initially did not work well enough. For example, reports in the first days of the mobile warning did not reach all transmission towers, which meant that not all residents of the Netherlands heard the sirens.