ROSEMARY ABBOTT | National
WAVE OF WARNINGS
Brad Bishop, 29, has declared he would now prefer to be taken out by a tsunami and a barrage of tidal waves than receive another violently loud Civil Defence emergency alert on his cell phone.
Bishop, who lives in Greymouth, said the nightmare began yesterday afternoon when the first warning pinged through his phone like “someone had fired a flare gun into my eardrum.”
“That first one at 4pm was a bit of a shock, but you kind of expect it, given the earthquake in Russia. I figured, alright, cheers for the heads-up, good to know there’s an earthquake thousands of miles away in a country I’ll never go to,” said Bishop, still visibly shaken.
“But then I was rudely woken up this morning by another one. I was starting to think, are we about to go to war or something?”
While the official alerts were sent out at 4:12pm yesterday and again at 6:30 this morning, a mysterious “glitch” in the system meant Bishop and countless others were treated to an impromptu symphony of sirens during the wee hours.
“I would genuinely rather be swept away unexpectedly by a rogue wave than be violently ambushed in the early hours of the morning by that bloody haunting alert system,” said Bishop, who compared the sound to “a car alarm inside a concrete tunnel being played through your skull.”
“Like, if I’m gonna die, just let the wave take me while I’m still asleep. Let the water from the tsunami gush over me and take me pleasantly. Don’t wake me up first, that’s just cruel.”
More to come.
