Bad idea of the day

[cdcox]

Last week we got an emergency alert that was unhelpful, to say the least. I was sitting in seminar and my phone was the only one to go off. It just said to evacuate. Like wtf? Where is the threat? Where should we evacuate to? We went back to listening to the seminar speaker, and after 5 min another alert goes off to several phones in the room. It names one of the main thoroughfares in town and a cross street no one had heard of. We googled to see if there was a news story, and sure enough there was one that was posted 30 min before the evacuation notice went off. So the media knew for 30 min before the evacuation notices were issued. It turned out we were not really close to the evacuation zone. It was a case of old dynamite that they found and were not sure if it was stable or not. A good reason to evacuate, but the messages were too late, not specific enough, and did not give actionable instructions. Kind of a failure from my perspective.