Why It Is Okay When Your Phone Suddenly Screams: Reading Korea's Emergency Alerts
The subway car goes loud all at once. Every phone around you shrieks the same alarm, and the screen fills with Korean you cannot read. This happens without warning once you are in Korea. If you do not speak the language it is frightening, but most of the time that sound does not mean evacuate now. There is a rule that separates one kind of alert from another, and it is written down in government regulation.
At a glance: an emergency alert sounds at the phone's maximum volume, at least 40 decibels - a safety notice arrives with your normal message tone - foreign-language translations come through the free Emergency Ready App, now in 5 languages - travel questions go to 1330, open 24 hours in 8 languages - for accidents and fire call 119, for crime call 112.
Under the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's Standards and Operating Rules for Disaster Text Broadcasting, messages sent to mobile phones are split by severity into emergency alerts and safety notices. Emergency alerts are used for terrorism, expected radioactive release, an issued evacuation order, and heavy rain sent directly by the head of the Korea Meteorological Administration. In those cases the phone rings at maximum volume, at least 40 decibels, even if you have turned the sound down. Safety notices cover advance evacuation advice, the lifting of an evacuation order, and other warnings and advisories, and they follow whatever message alert setting you already have. If it hit your ears, it was an emergency alert; if it arrived quietly like any other text, it was a safety notice. The top tier, used for things like an air raid warning, is handled separately under the civil defence warning system.
Since 2024, alerts that come with a siren tone also carry the type of disaster in English. Even if you cannot read Korean, find that word. Earthquake means an earthquake; Heavy rain means torrential rain; Tsunami means a seismic sea wave; Evacuation with Forest fire means leave because of a wildfire; Evacuation with Hazmat means leave because of a hazardous material release; Air raid warning is an air raid; Preliminary warning is an alert-level civil defence warning. Earthquake magnitude is written as M followed by a number, as in M6.0. If you see Earthquake, get under a table, cover your head, and go outside only after the shaking stops. If you see Heavy rain, stay out of underground car parks, semi-basement rooms and riverside paths. If the word Evacuation appears, move immediately in the direction the message gives. On the street, the yellow Earthquake Evacuation Zone signs and the red Shelter signs tell you where to go.
Time is the whole point. The Korea Meteorological Administration sends an emergency alert within 5 to 10 seconds of first detecting an earthquake, and has built a system that cuts this to 3 to 5 seconds for areas near the epicentre. That means the window before the shaking reaches you is, at best, a matter of tens of seconds. Spend one or two minutes copying the message into a translation app and that window is already gone. Memorising seven English words in advance cuts your reading time to a few seconds. A heavy-rain emergency alert goes out when 72mm or more falls in one hour, or when 50mm in an hour and 90mm in three hours are recorded together. Seventy-two millimetres in an hour is rain an umbrella cannot answer.
The ministry pushes translated alerts through the Emergency Ready App, built for foreign users. It began in English and Chinese and has grown to five languages with Vietnamese, Thai and Japanese added, and it carries 36 kinds of safety information including shelter locations and what to do in each situation. After installing it, open the settings at the bottom of the screen, switch Emergency Alert from Off to On, and set Receive Region, or nothing will reach you. On an iPhone the app follows the phone's own language setting, and there is a function that reads alerts aloud. As for switching them off: the regulation allows opting out of both emergency alerts and safety notices, so the sensible move is to turn off only safety notices in your phone's emergency alert settings. The top-tier alert has no off switch on the handset at all. If a message leaves you uneasy and you cannot tell what it says, call 1330. It is the tourist interpretation hotline run by the Korea Tourism Organization, open around the clock in Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai and Malay-Indonesian, and it charges nothing beyond the call itself. If someone is hurt or there is a fire call 119, for crime call 112, and an interpreter will be connected even if you speak no Korean.