Air raid sirens warning of disasters will be scrapped at the end of next year and replaced by NL-Alert. This came in a letter to the House of Representatives from outgoing Minister of Justice and Security Yesilgöz. The NL-Alert system, which sends notifications to cell phones, has now been greatly improved and the sirens no longer offer any benefits, she wrote.

The current Warning and Alert System (WAS) with sirens, which is tested every first Monday of every month at 12 noon, has been in place since 1998. The 4,200 sirens can be heard “in a best-case scenario at approximately 75 percent”. of the people,” writes the minister.

Removing air raid sirens has been a topic of discussion for years and has been postponed several times because the replacement warning system NL-Alert did not work well enough. For example, people living in rural areas and close to borders often did not receive the letters. On other phones, messages sometimes arrive ten times.

Last year, the Netherlands Institute for Public Safety conducted research into the added value of WAS poles and concluded that this could not be proven. The researchers also found that NL-Alert has fully developed and proven itself in recent years.

Since 2012, governments have been able to use NL-Alert to send alert messages via cell towers within a specific area. Since its inception, the communication tool has been used 538 times. There is currently an NL-Alert app. The test message reached 92 percent of the Dutch during the last measurement in December.

WAS pole maintenance contracts expire at the end of 2025. The minister wants to seize that moment to dismantle the system. Additional warning systems will remain in place at a number of high-risk locations.