TN Emergency Management: Go ahead and panic

At 9:34 this morning I got an emergency alert on my phone telling me to prepare an emergency kit, make a plan, and go to a website for more info.

This involved my phone blaring that warning alert during a meeting and me struggling to shut it up before noticing that message.

Vague warning to be sure. I looked outside, saw nothing, went to the only source of information listed and got a failure to connect to their website. This must be armageddon.

There was no info on news sites, although most were painfully slow to load, probably because nobody could get to the mentioned website. The world was ending and the internet shutting down due to overload of people trying to find out what was happening.

It turns out this was all part of a national preparedness month, and what we evidently should prepare for is vague warnings and a government website that is completely incapable of handling any sort of traffic.

After looking closer at the alert I saw that there was another alert that I had either missed or it came through later with an earlier time stamp that told me that this was National Preparedness Month.

It seems like the notification for National Preparedness Month might have been more conveniently mentioned a day or two before the false alarms.

It does appear that the TN Emergency Management Agency’s website is not prepared to handle traffic from their false alarms, which seems to be my main takeaway from this other than that I should probably now leave my phone elsewhere when in meetings as silenced o not you get these alarms.

So anyway, if you’re in TN and still getting these (which some people are judging by my FB feed,) world’s not ending, their website is down, TNEMA looks like tools and should prepare their website a little bit more in the event that it was actually needed.