A very strident alarm arrived at 11am, with English punctuality, to all the smart mobile phones of the people who were in the city of Barcelona. This is a Civil Protection test of the Generalitat to evaluate the mobile alert system in the Barcelona area.
An alert in the form of a message that has made the cell phones of Barcelona residents ring loudly and vibrate. The testing, which has already been done in other Catalan regions, is intended to check the system and familiarize the population, and is carried out in several regions of Catalonia between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. this Thursday.
The people of Barcelona received this alarm at 11 a.m., accompanied by a message warning that it was a test. "Civil Protection alert test of the Generalitat of Catalonia. It is a drill. Do not call 112. In a real emergency you would receive instructions to protect yourself", in Catalan, Spanish or English (depending on the configuration of each telephone).
Once again the message that has transcended the most, as happened in Madrid on September 3, has been that of social networks where users have taken the humor to comment on the alert.
At 10 o'clock it was received by the municipalities of Vallès Oriental, Maresme, Sant Adrià de Besòs, Badalona and Santa Coloma de Gramenet; at 11 o'clock in Barcelona; at 12 o'clock those of Vallès Occidental, and at 1 p.m. those of Baix Llobregat and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
About 90% of citizens have received the Civil Protection alert in the first two drills carried out in the Barcelona area this Thursday. At 10 a.m. the warning was sent to the towns of Vallès Oriental, Maresme, Sant Adrià del Besòs, Badalona and Santa Coloma de Gramenet, and at 11 a.m. to the city of Barcelona.
The Minister of the Interior, Joan Ignasi Elena, has assessed the drill as a "success" and has assured that the system has worked as expected. As he has indicated, the objective of the alert is to give "clear and exceptional messages": "It is not service information." Elena has stated that the test has served as a "thermometer" to know that the population knows the system: "The optimal thing is to reach 100% and this helps us go in that direction."
To evaluate how the test has been developed, the Generalitat will enable an anonymous survey that will not collect "any personal data" so that citizens can report whether or not they have received the message, in what language and what company they are from, among other indications. .
