Greeks complain 112 emergency alert reminds them of boy who cried wolf
One of Aesop’s widely known fables is about the shepherd boy who cried wolf. After repeated unwarranted warnings, when a wolf actually appears, the disillusioned villagers no longer believe his cries and the town’s flock is eaten by the beast. The message of the folktale is quite clear: Repeated false alarms can make a population skeptical, leading to disbelief or inaction even when some end up actually being true.
This sentiment seems to be shared by some Greeks today, with regard to the country’s emergency notification system, known as 112, which has been sending repeated alerts as Greece is battling numerous wildfires and facing unusual weather phenomena.
“I have received countless alerts these past few weeks, some for fires happening several kilometers away and some for weather conditions that were not actually that extreme,” Eleni Tsaliki, an architect based in Athens, tells Kathimerini English Edition. “It has reached a point where, whenever there is a 112 alert, I simply glance at my screen and immediately silence my phone, which is not ideal.”
The 112 notification system was officially enabled in 2020, after repetitive delays by previous administrations, and is currently coordinated by the General Secretariat of Civil Protection at the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection. It sends alarms and notifications to citizens’ phones in cases of emergency or dangerous natural phenomena, warning them about imminent risks and offering useful instructions to guarantee their safety.
It is a necessary prevention mechanism used by most countries, undeniably an effective tool in emergency preparedness and response that has proven a lifesaver in many different circumstances around the world. It helps organize timely evacuations and alerts people to avoid exposure to natural disasters and extreme weather phenomena.
But despite its undeniable importance, numerous Greeks have recently started to identify and call out some problems with the implementation of the notification system, blaming it for ringing too frequently, too inconsistently and, occasionally, for no good reason.
“In my experience, location tracking and the range of messaging have been rather problematic,” says Markos, a 29-year-old electrician who lives in the western Athens neighborhood of Aegaleo. “I have been in some situations where everybody received an alert on their phones except me. On the other hand, I recently received a 112 alert while in Aegaleo about a wildfire in the region of Feriza, which is located southeast of Athens. It was actually more than 50 kilometers away from where I was,” he says, adding that he had to “google the location in order to make sure I shouldn’t panic unnecessarily.”
A similar situation occurred a few weeks ago, on July 4, when an emergency 112 alert was issued for Attica ahead of some storms, calling on residents to limit their movements and to follow any instructions issued by the authorities. The sudden summer storms did end up posing quite the risk in some parts of the country; however, many citizens in Athens’ southern suburbs found the alert completely unnecessary, as by the end of the day their neighborhoods had barely faced a light drizzle.
The alert echoed in unison at a full theater in the Onassis Stegi cultural center, which on July 4 was hosting a festival on artificial intelligence in education, with pleasant weather, and where Education Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis, a former minister of digital governance, was also present. Later that day, he admitted that perhaps AI could be used to improve 112’s efficiency and ensure that alerts are more targeted.
A resident who lives in the eastern Peloponnese complained to Kathimerini English Edition that on the very same day, residents in her village didn’t receive a 112 alert, even though the magnitude of the storm in their area was quite severe. “Several houses flooded, and the combination of strong winds and excessive rainfall was life-threatening,” she says. “I am quite surprised that we didn’t end up receiving any notifications.”
Tweaks and improvements
As the climate crisis is making extreme weather phenomena in Greece more common and more intense, and particularly in the summer season, some people posit that Greeks must simply get used to receiving alerts more frequently.
Others believe that the emergency notification system has room for improvement, and that several tweaks and improvements could make it more reliable and help it maintain its credibility. Apart from fixes in geolocation and the range of messaging, a number of citizens have suggested that 112 could use a varying scale of different notifications depending on the circumstances.
Tsaliki believes that the improvement could see 112 turning into a two-tier system of notifications, “with loud alarms buzzing in cases of wildfires and other natural disasters, and a slightly more subtle notification in cases of weather phenomena such as heatwaves or rainfall.”
Anastasios Fakinos, a Greek musician and instructor who has been based in the US for the past decade – where citizens are quite accustomed to receiving wireless emergency alerts (WEA) that concern severe weather or other emergencies – thinks that awareness and cultivating a culture that prioritizes safety can also play an important part.
“Although WEA was introduced in the US about 12 years ago, it was welcomed as it ensures public safety, a very sensitive issue for us,” he tells Kathimerini English Edition. “It’s true that some people find the alerts disruptive or annoying, especially when they occur at night – for example, receiving a tornado alert in New Jersey in the middle of the night, which is uncommon, can be unsettling. But even if it’s unlikely for the tornado to pass over your house, you still follow the rules and move everyone to the basement,” he adds.
For Fakinos, the emergency notification system is also a matter of education, “which raises concerns about how people in Greece will react,” as he explains. “An adjustment period and effective communication can help familiarize the public in Greece. Trust in authorities is also a concern, but people need to give it a chance. False alarms may happen, and they happen here too, but this is outweighed by the fact that this system saves lives every day,” he concludes.
