The 2,830 sirens which, on the first Wednesdays of the month, sound in France, will soon no longer be the only ones to alert the French of a danger, fire, storm, terrorist attack or industrial accident. At the end of June, the population alert and information system (SAIP) of the Ministry of the Interior will have an additional tool to warn people directly on their mobile phone. Using so-called cell broadcast technology (cell broadcast), FR-Alert will send in a few seconds a written notification accompanied by a shrill ringtone to all the telephones present in the zone concerned by the danger.
Many countries already have such an alert system, such as the United States, since 2006, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium and more recently Tunisia. “France is acquiring a state-of-the-art system and will be in the first third of European countries equipped for this technology”, underlines Romain Moutard, lieutenant-colonel of the fire brigade who led this program. A European directive of December 2018 imposes the implementation, before June 21, 2022, of an alert system capable of “to reach end users, including those who are only present in the affected area on a temporary basis”, such as foreign tourists. The sending of notifications in English was also part of the second test, carried out on June 7 in the chemical valley, near Lyon (Rhône), after that carried out in mid-May in Fos-sur-Mer (Bouches-du -Rhone). The multilingualism of FR-Alert is essential in view of the organization in France, in the fall of 2023, of the Rugby World Cup and, the following summer, the Paris Olympic Games 2024.
These tests also aimed to see how the population reacts to receiving a potentially anxiety-provoking notification. “We must prepare the population to receive this type of message but also write and adapt the alert according to the number of people to be warned and the type of danger”, explains Johnny Douvinet, geographer and professor at the University of Avignon, who, with these studies, participates in the definition of the doctrine of sending messages. During the Lyon test, which simulated an accident in the Sibelin marshalling yard, four hundred and fifty questionnaires were collected. “90% of people who received the notification asking them to confine themselves to a closed building say that they would have applied the instruction”, emphasizes Mr. Douvinet. But some found the notification too intrusive and wondered how anyone could have accessed their phone.
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