It’s a fairly common complaint that some people get emergency alerts and some don’t. It’s usually been blamed on the carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, etc) but the past few days I’m guessing it’s pretty much Nashville’s issue.
It started on May 31st where a MEANS (Metro Emergency Alert and Notification System,) alert telling Nashville it was under curfew at 8pm was delivered at 7:40pm giving the few people who sign up for MEANS exactly 19 minutes at 22 seconds to avoid being arrested by the National Guard or Metro if they were out.
I’ve not heard of anyone receiving an emergency alert, which they should have.
Monday’s first notification for a 10pm curfew on June 1st came via the MEANS system at 10:21PM on June 1st. 21 minutes after the curfew started. From my Facebook feed I see people started getting the emergency alert a couple of minutes later. I did not immediately.
My wife received an emergency alert about 10:25pm, and then at 10:56 I received the emergency alert that 56 minutes prior we were under curfew. Then at 10:59 I got it again. Then at 11:52pm third time got it ok. I’ll give you one guess why I’m awake and writing at 1:13am on a Tuesday.
We’ve reached a point where the phones have been turned off, or the emergency alerts silenced on my phone, because the system appears to be broken.
In this particular case, MEANS was also supposed to email me:
I checked, nope no emails.
Back a few months ago in disaster #1 for Nashville we had several people die because they were asleep when a 1am tornado hit out of the freaking blue. I start wondering whether this might have contributed to them being asleep. No warning. Between my wife’s phone and mine I believe we showed one emergency alert and neither of us heard it.
So yeah… the IT city isn’t doing I.T. right.
