Delay sending Storm Eunice alerts may have led to more injuries

When the 112 emergency center became overloaded during storm Eunice early this year, it took almost 90 minutes to send an NL Alert appealing to people to only call the emergency number if absolutely necessary. All that time, the emergency center was virtually unreachable. While that probably did not lead to more deaths, “it is plausible that people have suffered health damage,” the Neterhaldns Institute for Public Safety (NIPV) said in a report, according to NOS.

Storm Eunice crossed the Netherlands on Friday, February 18, triggering a code red weather warning for the coastal provinces. The storm caused a great deal of damage. Four people died, strong winds blew over trucks, air traffic came to a standstill, many trees toppled, and roofs came down in some places.

At the height of the storm, people called 112 en masse. The lines became overloaded around 3:45 p.m., resulting in some callers being unable to reach the emergency number. Just after 4:00 p.m., the national 112 central decided to send an NL Alert to urge people to only call the emergency number in life-threatening situations.

But to send an NL Alert required approval from the National Crisis Center and the National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism and Security (NCTV). That approval took about an hour to get. Then it took another 12 minutes to actually send the NL Alert.

The alert had the desired effect - the number of calls decreased rapidly, and the control room became reachable again.

The NIPV, a government institute in which the security regions and emergency services exchange knowledge, recommends that the Ministry of Justice and Security investigate how NL Alerts can be sent more quickly in the future.

It also advised looking at when a code red weather warning gets issued. Currently, code red depends on both the weather conditions and the “social impact” the weather can have. That could mean that the same weather gets a code orange on Sunday evening - because there is less traffic on the road, for example - and a code red on a Monday morning. According to the NIPV, that causes confusion.