Cautious Welcome For Emergency Warning System

EMERGENCY planners in the county have welcomed a new government system for evaluating any threat to the public from terrorism.
The new system uses five different grades ranging from low to critical, with an indication of what response the public should take. The previous system had seven different grades.

However, the county council?s emergency planning officer, John Kelly, believes that there ought to have been a colour-coded system using green, amber and red.
In a statement, he said: “I give a cautious welcome to this but had hoped that the government would have gone slightly further and introduced a simple to understand colour-coded system as in America.
“We need a need a simple traffic light system or messages direct to telephones in the affected area when an incident happens. For a severe threat there needs to be an additional national warning system such as sirens.
“In Oxfordshire we have sirens and text messaging alerts and we would have hoped that by now there had been some movement towards a unified national system.”