At 11 a.m. the sirens wailed, the phones rang, the announcements were made: Saxony’s warning systems were also put to the test on Thursday. The government and control centers draw an initial positive balance.
Dresden (dpa / sn) – A few hours after checking the warning systems, Saxony’s government and control centers drew an initial positive balance. “The first feedback from the Saxon control centers regarding the sirens has been positive so far,” said Interior Minister Armin Schuster (CDU). Saxons were given a trial warning on Thursday morning at 11 a.m. on the occasion of the nationwide warning day via sirens, messages and announcements. The Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), based in Bonn, managed the test of the systems.
Regularly checking warning systems for their functionality can save lives, emphasized Schuster. In an emergency, every second counts. “From this perspective alone, I see today’s warning day as a success,” said the minister. An evaluation by the BBK will show how well the systems really worked. This is one of the reasons why he campaigned to take part in the official BBK survey in order to share his own experiences.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, there are a total of around 3,200 sirens in Saxony. Others are to be added, some of them financed by federal funds. For example, the district of Mittelsachsen counted the most sirens with 417. On the other hand, according to the ministry and the city, there is not a single one in Leipzig. A spokesman for the city said that the system, which existed until the early 1990s, was technically worn out and extremely prone to failure. “The city of Leipzig then decided to set up a multi-level warning system with different warning devices, which can be used to transport much more extensive warning content than with sirens.”
There are a total of 210 sirens in Dresden, the city and the Ministry of the Interior announced. These were triggered there by the integrated regional control center. According to the city, the national siren signal to warn of a danger could be heard: A howling tone, consisting of six tones of five seconds each with a five-second pause. In total, the signal is one minute long. An announcement will then follow. Three quarters of an hour after the warning signal was triggered, the all clear came.
The majority of the sirens worked, the Dresden fire department announced on Thursday afternoon. 97 percent of the sirens were demonstrably triggered. The other sirens were not connected to the network due to construction work or had not reported back whether they had been triggered. Because wind, traffic and ambient noise had influenced the voice announcements transmitted via the sirens, intelligibility could not be guaranteed at every location. In addition, numerous people had shared their impressions on social media, it said. A total of over 18,000 interactions were recorded on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
While many are already familiar with the howling of the sirens from the old days or the memory of the last warning day in 2020, the federal government also wants to test a new way of warning this year: a message on the cell phone, sent via the so-called Cell Broadast. “But the technology isn’t all that new,” said Michael Einhaus, who teaches and researches mobile communications and high-frequency technology at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences (HTWK). From a purely technical point of view, nothing has spoken against it in Germany in recent years. Network operators in Japan and the USA, among others, have been sending messages via cell broadcast for years.
An interface has been set up for authorities and control centers, explained Einhaus, who received such a message on a trip to Korea a few months ago. “Because there’s no need to download an app to receive, the threshold is lower,” he said. The prerequisite is that the mobile phone is connected to the German mobile network and the operating system is sufficiently up-to-date. “That means at least Android 11 or iOS 16.”
Einhaus said it was unclear how many people would be reached via cell broadcast in Germany. He is curious when and on which devices the warning will be received. Several devices are already available for this purpose, and the professor also wants to ask his students whether and when they received the message.
