Nearly jumped out my skin a few minutes ago when sirens started blaring. The emergency alert system just triggered, with this generic message about wildfires.
Not any actual impending ones about to burn my house down. Just the general possibility. Because of a heatwave nobody has apparently noticed.
Thought the bomb was about to drop for a second. Has nobody in our government heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Sorry if this is venting but this rather caught me by surprise.
Do you guys have any sort of "fire ban/fire restriction" legislation? It sounds like you don't have normal channels of communication for this kind of thing, hence the emergency alerts.
Maybe your government can do a bit of copy and paste from Australia, eg this is my "fire info" page for my home state of Queensland, showing which shire council areas currently have a fire ban in place.
All this stuff is enforced via legislation at state level here, which you don't have a direct equivalent of. Probably something higher than shire councils and lower than UK parliament would deal with it over there as it's broadly region based. Once it's legislated with various steps between "all ok" and "don't even light a match", the decision to enforce a ban doesn't take much dithering about. Here bans can be put in place by the Queensland fire department at their discretion so politicians keep out of it.
We also have signs like these sprinkled around the place so that people know when it's not a great time to be having a bonfire. In Australia that usually ends up being one continuous block between October and March.
