The benefits of ‘alert privilege’

There’s no way to know, because the test didn’t measure number of successful texts

Well, here’s my best news of the week.

Come the zombie apocalypse, I’m getting a head start on a bunch of the rest of you.

There’s a new kind of privilege to be had in Canada.

Alert privilege.

At 1:55 p.m. Wednesday, right on cue, my iPhone whined and shrieked like a Harry Potter howler, warning me of a non-specific test disaster in the offing.

Did you get the message, the way we were all supposed to?

Mazel tov. You can join me in the safety of our deluxe zombie shelter.

I’ll need your company, because quite a few of my friends and relations didn’t get the alert.

Wednesday was the first Alberta test of the National Alert Aggregation Dissemination System, or NAAD, a new federal initiative to warn and inform Canadians when disaster strikes.

Alberta already has a robust emergency alert system, one of the most advanced in the country. The province uses TV, radio, Twitter and Facebook to send out urgent messages in case of major threats such as a tornado, wildfire or flood. Alberta was the first province to create an emergency alert app — available for Android and Apple users.

Alberta has had all too much experience in the last couple of years with natural disasters, and we’ve had all too many opportunities to put our system through its paces.

But what happened Wednesday was different.

It was a test of a new national system, Alert Ready, which connects directly with wireless phones on LTE networks. You don’t need to download anything.

You don’t need an app. You don’t need to register or subscribe.

NAAD operates through a partnership between Pelmorex, the parent company of the Weather Network, and Alberta’s various wireless carriers, such as Telus and Rogers.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. When there’s a less serious emergency, like a whiteout or a serious windstorm, the province will issue an alert through its existing system. But if officials decide a situation is “critical” — an alert will go out automatically on the National Alert system too.

Pelmorex will send the alert to every wireless provider. And the wireless provider will send a very loud text message to our smartphones via cell towers in the area.

It can be very geographically specific.

If there’s a major wildfire in Grande Cache, for example, only the cellphone towers in and around Grande Cache will send out the alert. If a refinery explodes in Sherwood Park? People in Calgary or Fort McMurray won’t be bothered by an alert. It will only be sent out from cellphone towers near the disaster.

Since fewer and fewer people watch TV or listen to AM/FM radio, and since most of us have our cellphones with us wherever we go, the wireless NAAD system has the potential to reach us, even if we’re out walking the dog or asleep with our phones by our beds.

But here’s the thing. The system won’t work if it doesn’t, um, work. And there were widespread reports of glitches across the province.

According to Paul Temple, the senior vice-president of regulatory and strategic affairs for Pelmorex, Wednesday’s test in Alberta was a success.

“It worked exactly as it was supposed to work. And it worked within seconds,” he told me on Friday.

By which he meant that the alert moved as it was meant to, from the province to Pelmorex to the phone companies.

But nobody knows how many Albertans actually got the alert on their phones or other wireless devices. Pelmorex wasn’t tracking. Public Safety Canada, the federal department responsible for NAAD, wasn’t tracking that either.

In other words, a test was performed with no way to measure whether the system passed. All we have are anecdotal reports. This seems to me, to put it mildly, a flaw in the design of the test.

(Still, we did much better than Quebec, where the system didn’t work at all.)

So why didn’t some Albertans get the alert?

Temple said it might be because of their cellphone model, their cellphone manufacturer or the cellphone’s software settings. It seems to be up to phone owners to figure that out for themselves. Pelmorex now plans to meet with public safety and wireless companies to figure out what happened.

“We’re going to sit down and look at how things went and whether there’s room for improvement.”

And if you’re not one of the chosen people? One of the Alert Elite? The National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination System has actually been live in Alberta since April 6. So if there is a real emergency, be it a terrorist attack, a toxic chemical spill, or an earthquake? I’ll do my best to let you know!