Murphy’s Logic: N.S. emergency alert system needs repair

Steve Murphy thinks Nova Scotia’s emergency alert system needs some repairs.

One of the great benefits of personal digital communication is that important messages can be delivered to large numbers of people virtually instantly and at the same time.

One of the great drawbacks is that unimportant messages are similarly delivered.

Whether something is deemed important or unimportant depends on the recipient and whether they want or need the information. Relevance, like beauty, often lies in the eye of the beholder.

Authorities in Nova Scotia were properly criticized for failing to make timely use of the province’s emergency alert system during the mass murders of April 2020.

Up until that time, the system had been rarely, if ever, used to alert the public to a widespread threat to public safety or anything else. And even then, when it was finally used, the information provided was very late in coming and at least incomplete, if not misleading.

Since that dreadful weekend and the resulting criticism, the pendulum has swung sharply in the opposite direct. Emergency alerts have become much more frequent in Nova Scotia.

Some would say too frequent.

In early July, a missing persons alert startled tens of thousands from a sound sleep at 1:30 a.m. While a missing person is of real concern, it does not pose a threat to public safety and does not warrant the sort of cacophonous alarm that sounds when an emergency alert is issued. Cases of child abduction or other criminal activity are an obvious exception.

Beyond the bracing nature of the audio, the overuse of alerts for situations that do not involve widespread risk is likely to lead some people to ignore them altogether.

Let’s devise a graduated system capable of issuing several levels of alerts, based on the nature and the extent of the risk to the public, including some that don’t trigger the jarring audio that can panic people day and night.