Gone is the bullhorn. Instead, New York City emergency management officials have turned high-tech, using drones to warn residents about potential threatening weather.
With a buzzing sound in the background, a drone equipped with a loudspeaker flies over homes warning people who live in basement or ground-floor apartments about impending heavy rains.
“Be prepared to leave your location,” said the voice from the sky in footage released Tuesday by the city’s emergency management agency. “If flooding occurs, do not hesitate.”
Is the existing emergency alert system not sufficient? It already activates TV, radio, and cell phones.
Not to mention, what’s wrong with plain old sirens on poles? I refuse to believe that drones are somehow cheaper to buy/operate/maintain.
No cameras on them and they don’t normalize the idea of police drones buzzing around your neighborhood.
That is a very good point.
In Dallas, our sirens don’t mean tornado; they mean go indoors to avoid large hail or high winds. It’s crazy confusing for people who don’t know, go hide in their bathrooms, and then get pissed off when there’s no tornado. An alternate/backup method would be good (voice or different siren?) but I’m not sure a drone can tolerate a severe weather situation.
Or if you live near a nuclear plant, people think the airens are for tornados… nope, if you hear these, you ran away!
because if you set off a siren like that, all of the Orthodox Jews will assume its the Sabbath and run home.
see, they already do this every Friday just before sundown to mark the beginning of the Sabbath, so…
edit: this may just be limited to Williamsburg/Bed-Stuy
My tinfoil hat theory is that Drones are far better at mass surveillance than current emergency alert systems, so while the advantage over the existing emergency alert system is probably negligible - it opens the door for people accepting having drones everywhere and constantly overhead which is the real goal.
For a second layer of tinfoil, having a strong drone presence (production, infrastructure, technology) in the economy seems like it will be very useful for future wars. Whoever has the largest and smartest swarm wins
For slightly less tinfoil haberdashery, it could be used to more rapidly locate people during a weather disaster, identify what areas are most heavily impacted in real-time, and redirect emergency services in case of, say, debris blocking a road.
This is of course assuming it’s not the cheapest shit the highest bidder offers (which it probably will be) that disintegrates during a light rain.
No. You need the government flying machines outside your window to let you know about your freedoms.
We can assume an amount of people in NYC that have no access to any of those.
It’s not a bad supplement to existing systems.