General crisis communication with text message alerts coming soon

When a terrorist attack, disaster or other emergency strikes, everyone in the danger zone will soon receive an alert by text message, even visitors and foreign travellers, Jan Jambon, Minister of the Interior, recently announced in his new policy brief. The brief also refers to a new system for crisis communication between government services and to new emergency plans.

Minister Jambon compares the “SMS-Alert” project to the radio car that used to drive around neighbourhoods warning people and telling them for example to keep their windows and doors closed. “They will now get this information on their mobile phones,” he explains. “This allows us to send them a text message alert and keep them informed about what they should do.”

SMS-Alert will exist in tandem with BE-Alert, a successful pilot project that was launched last year. “But BE-Alert only sends alerts to people who have voluntarily subscribed to the service. SMS-Alert allows us to reach 100 percent of the people in a specific risk zone,” Jan Jambon emphasises. “We can even see who hasn’t yet read an emergency SMS alert.” By way of comparison, a similar project in the Netherlands only reaches 30 percent of the people in the risk zone - although it should be noted that it uses different technology.

National emergency plan
Next year, a single secure web portal called the “Incident & Crisis Management System” will be launched for crisis communication among government services. This national emergency system will replace the existing systems in Antwerp, Limburg and Liège. Finally, Jan Jambon also announced in his policy brief that Belgium would get new emergency plans. For example, a “special national emergency plan in case of terrorist attack” is on the way, which will coordinate a general response regardless of the type of attack. Currently there are all sorts of different terror emergency plans that focus on different aspects, a nuclear attack for example. Jan Jambon also wants to develop a similar national emergency plan for all possible cyber incidents in our country.