Eastern Iowa, Here’s Why Your Phone May Go Berserk This Weekend

You can really only prepare yourself so much for these.

One thing we can all agree on is that those weather emergency alerts/AMBER alerts on our phones make us all hit the ceiling. It's like a mini-nuclear alarm just exploded on our phone. It's made me throw my phone more than once.

As you can guess by now, we're in for one this weekend. But here's the good news: we know why and when.

According to WQAD, the Scott County Emergency Management Agency will test it's Wireless Emergency Alert system for everyone who's opted into it. This will be just an opt-in test message to make sure that the system is good to go in case of an emergency and the emergency message will say 'test' on it.

You can expect your phone to sound like a caffeinated bullhorn on Saturday, January 4th at 1:00 p.m. Remember: it's a test, chill out.

The WEA system is designed for Presidential Alerts, Imminent Threat Alerts (that includes weather), Public Safety Alerts, AMBER Alerts, and the occasional test like we're about to get.

It's also a matter of making sure people with different wireless carriers get it. Scott County EMA Director Brian Payne told WQAD:

We have a lot of government agencies, partners that we work with on a very regular basis for emergency management who are going to be in the jurisdictional areas, and they're going to complete a survey for us. So we know they had this cell phone carrier, they had this type of cell phone. They received it. They didn't receive it. So we can actually pinpoint through mapping, here's where some of our gaps are.

Some of those gaps were in the LeClaire area since it was considered out of Scott County, though they pinged on a tower in Rapids City.

Payne says to not be alarmed if you get the alert on your phone for the test but how can you not? You can see on your phone's Settings if you're opted in to the emergency alerts (which you really should be, as inconvenient as they can be).