Lee Hyo-jin covers the Bank of Korea, the banking industry and broader financial news. Her previous beats include foreign affairs, North Korea and general reporting on Korean society.
People tired of frequent emergency text alerts
By Lee Hyo-jin
More people are growing weary of the “excessive” number of emergency alert notifications amid the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic and frequent typhoons recently, according to disaster prevention experts, Thursday.
Those experts fear the public will develop a tolerance to disaster alerts and not act appropriately in the event of an emergency of greater magnitude.
These text alerts received on Aug. 30 are disaster notifications about new coronavirus infection cases sent from multiple local governments and strengthened social distancing measures from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. / Korea Times photo by Lee Hyo-jin
By Lee Hyo-jin
Emergency text alerts are sent out by various government agencies to warn about natural disasters and to provide guidelines in emergency situations. Although mobile notifications from the government have been issued for some years now, they have been heavily used as a far-reaching digital public announcement system since the early days of the pandemic.
The increasing number of repetitive messages about COVID-19 over the past few months has been shifting public opinion on these emergency notifications.
More than 25,000 text messages have been sent from various government agencies nationwide from January to August this year, according to the Ministry of Interior and Safety. This is a 48-fold increase compared with 527 sent in the same period last year.
August showed the largest number, a total of 10,394 messages, due to the resurgence of infections, as well as floods brought by the wettest rainy season on record plus mega typhoons that have been battering the country.
Although the purpose of emergency texts is to keep the public informed of natural disasters and the spread of coronavirus infections, some municipalities are overusing them by sending what some consider irrelevant information.
Gyeonggi City used alert texts to warn people against flying propaganda leaflets over the border into North Korean in June. Daegu City sent multiple messages to promote its disaster relief money program. Gijang County in Busan has issued more than 30 repeated messages on its social distancing campaign.
“It's very bothering to receive more than 10 texts every day, including irrelevant ones from Seongnam or Hanam in Gyeonggi Province,” said Joo Young-Eun, an office worker living in Songpa-gu, southeastern Seoul.
These multiple messages occur because the emergency alerts are sent based on a person's current location, rather than place of residence. Telecommunication operators automatically send the message to every cellphone in the range of their base station.
“I used to read all the messages in March when we had a lot of infections in our area, but lately I haven't paid as much attention to them since I already know it will be about the virus or a typhoon,” said Lee Yoon-ji, a resident in Daegu.
“People choosing to ignore emergency alerts can lead to a serious accident in the future as they keep overlooking information about disasters,” said Lee Young-joo, a professor at the department of fire and disaster prevention at the University of Seoul.
“Local governments should be more judicious in sending emergency alert messages, and refrain from overusing the system.”