Safety, Reliability and Risk Analysis: Beyond the Horizon – Steenbergen et al. (Eds) © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-00123-7 Writing short alarm messages: A matter of education, training and practice

ABSTRACT: The Netherlands has a new tool to alarm and inform the population in case of crises. NL-Alert can simultaneously draw people’s attention and explain the crisis matter. The use requires determining of both the impact area and the alarm text. This raises questions about required knowledge and expertise to compose messages. Current experiences are mainly based on communication aimed at educating about potential future crisis. Composing a textual message in limited time to alarm the popula-tion is a different job. A good message meets three criteria: completeness (description of threat, location and action), relevance (receiver can determine if alarm is intended for him/her) and correctness given situation. TU Delft analysed messages composed by experts and laypeople on length, content, structure and readability. Results show anyone can compose an alarm message, the difficulty lie in decision on deployment and being able to gather information for the correct and relevant message content. nationwide. All safety regions in The Netherlands can dispatch messages from their emergency con-trol room. Within seconds mobile phones in the specified geographical area will pick up the mes-sage. NL-Alert is currently positioned as a valuable addition to existing means, such as the siren, the emergency broadcasting stations and the crisis.nl website. The launch marked the start of a national public campaign: ‘NL-Alert, immediate infor-mation in emergency situations’. This campaign should make the population aware of the new sup-plementary emergency alert system and the neces-sity to check if the setting of once mobile phone needs adjustment in order to receive messages. Since its launch, NL-Alert has been used in five incidents (December 2012, twice in January 2013 and twice in April 2013) until mid-April 2013. In February 2013 a nationwide control message was broadcasted together with the monthly test of the outdoor siren. In multiple other countries, for example Japa