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Next Thursday, September 14, all smart mobile phones with coverage in the demarcation of Barcelona will receive a test message from the Generalitat's Civil Protection alert system. The test will take place between 10 am and 1 pm in the counties of Barcelonès, Vallès Occidental, Vallès Oriental, Maresme and Baix Llobregat, and will be the largest population-based test that has been carried out so far in Catalonia.
The purpose of the mass sending of messages is to test the alert system and familiarize the population. The text will be as follows: "CIVIL PROTECTION ALERT PROOF OF THE GOVERNMENT OF CATALONIA. IT'S A SIMULACRE. Do not call 112. In a real emergency you would receive instructions to protect yourself”.
The tests will take place at different times:
• At 10 a.m. in the municipalities of Vallès Oriental, Maresme, Sant Adrià del Besòs, Badalona and Santa Coloma de Gramenet
• At 11 a.m. on mobile phones in Barcelona
• At 12 pm in the municipalities of Vallès Occidental
• At 1 p.m. in Baix Llobregat and Hospitalet de Llobregat
All the smart mobile phones in the area, and also all those of those passing by by road or rail, will receive the alert on their mobile.
The messages are clearly identified because they are headed by the text "Civil Protection Alert", or by the text "Presidential Alert", depending on the configuration of the mobile phone, and remain on the screen until the "accept" button is pressed.
The sound is loud and shrill, different from other device sounds, and the notification is also accompanied by vibration. At the time of the test all mobile phones will ring and vibrate simultaneously, even if they are on silent.
People who, for work reasons or because they have a high sensitivity to certain sounds, do not want to receive it, will have to put the phone in airplane mode or turn it off.
Latest generation mobile devices have the reception of alerts activated by default. They are Android version 11 or higher and iOS version 15.6 or higher. In the case of older mobile phones, you need to configure them to receive alerts by following these instructions.
The mass sending system to mobile phones is very useful, as it allows mass dissemination in a very short space of time. It will only be used in cases of serious emergency where Civil Protection determines that it is necessary to give instructions to the population such as, for example, confinement in the face of a chemical accident or floods, among others.
To evaluate the alert system, the Generalitat will enable, as it has also done in the previous four tests, a survey for citizens to report whether or not they have received the message, in which language, which company they belong to, etc. It is an anonymous survey that does not collect any personal data.
So far, Civil Protection has carried out four tests of the alert system on the population's mobile phone to test the tool and familiarize the population. The first, on February 28 in Lleida, the High Pyrenees and Aran; the second, on April 12 in the vegueries of Tarragona, Terres de l'Ebre and Penedès, in which there was an error in the sending which meant that many telephones did not receive the message; the third, on April 27 at the vegueries of Central Catalonia and Girona, and the fourth, last June 13 to repeat the test at the vegueries of Tarragona, Terres de l'Ebre and Penedès.
Likewise, the system has already been used in several real emergencies such as fires or the recent floods in Alcanar.
