Warning office
Warning offices were in the Federal Republic of Germany to the 1990 's with the warning and alert the public from dangers in peace and defense case entrusted. They belonged to the civil defense .
tasks
The warning offices were subordinate to the Federal Office for Civil Protection and, like all civil protection, fell within the remit of the Federal Minister of the Interior . They were lower federal agencies . You could volunteer for the warning service. A multi-year obligation was counted as alternative military service . Since there were only a few warning offices, it was difficult to comply with such an obligation when moving.
The warning offices were founded in 1957/58 as a result of the increasingly threatening Cold War . Prior to that, since the end of World War II , who from the Reichsluftschutzbund emerged Federal Air Protection Association or the warning and alarm service of the air-raid auxiliary service charge.
The warning offices were dissolved in the mid-1990s. At first it was thought that devices for warning the population were largely dispensable. From 2000 onwards, various projects were set up for research purposes, which dealt, for example, with warning using special radio clocks and similar methods. The public is currently being warned via MoWaS .
In the beginning, “dangers” only meant military dangers such as air attacks , long-range gunfire ( artillery ) and, later, attacks with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons ( ABC weapons ). To ward off nuclear dangers, the warning service set up a measuring network to measure environmental radioactivity. This ODL measuring network had around 1500 measuring points. After the warning offices were dissolved, this monitoring network was transferred to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection on July 1, 1997 , where it continues to be maintained. In the course of time, the concept of danger was defined more broadly: From now on, the warning service should also warn of civil dangers (such as leaks of pollutants and others) ; Furthermore, fire or disaster alarms could be triggered centrally for several locations. New siren signals were created for this purpose.
The maintenance, construction and upkeep of sirens and lines was entrusted to the Deutsche Bundespost , which was also responsible for renting installation space for warning systems.
In addition to the sirens, the warning offices maintained the so-called warning network . It was a kind of telephone system with broadcast stations, which means that the warning offices could make announcements to all of the up to 12,000 connected so-called "warning stations". In addition to the main administrative officials and the control centers, certain companies were also connected to the warning network and were obliged to do so by statutory order.
location
The former ten warning offices were based at:
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They each consisted of a fenced area in a secluded location with an administration building, accommodation building, communication tower and the warning office bunker. The buildings were arranged so that from the air they looked like a civil facility. The heavily protected bunkers were each constructed in the same way and enabled the warning office staff to stay for 30 days without contact with the outside world. Today the properties are privately owned or used, for example, by the federal police or the THW .
As civil defense facilities, the warning service facilities were specially protected under international law.
The term Warnamt Eifel hides the bunkered alternative seat of the North Rhine-Westphalian state government near Kall.
Measuring vehicle
Since 1990, each of the ten warning offices has had four-wheel-drive measuring vehicles equipped with helium-cooled germanium semiconductor detectors. The cooling took place with the help of a cryogenerator , which cooled the detector to 70 Kelvin and was supplied by a power generator. The power generator with 5000 watts also supplied the measuring system, a special heating and ventilation system for the cooling compressor, and the operating room air conditioning. The detector was firmly connected to the vehicle and was moved out to the rear by a mechanism. Lead rings placed horizontally around the crystal ensured that the gamma radiation from the ground below the detector was measured. The connected multi-channel analyzer could resolve 4000 channels. The spectrum of gamma radiation was measured on the move with these vehicles . The nuclide library, with which the individual nuclides could be identified, contained 60 radionuclides (36 fission products, 17 activation products and 7 natural gamma emitters) and was thus able to resolve the nuclides of all conceivable contamination scenarios. In the event of radioactive contamination, the nuclides should be determined quickly and precisely on site so that appropriate preventive measures can be taken. After the warning offices were closed, the vehicles went to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. Today there is a corresponding vehicle (VW T5) in each of the six measuring network nodes of the ODL measuring network .
See also
- Disaster alert
- Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance
- Government bunker (Germany)
Web links
- History of the warning service at geschichtsspuren.de (formerly lostplaces.de)
- Warnamt II eV , an association to maintain the warning office near Bassum
- Warnamt II and Warnamt III
- Visit to the former warning office I
- From the warning office to the scout center. Boy Scout Center Donnerskopf, accessed on February 3, 2016 .
swell
- ↑ See critically Lars Clausen / Wolf R. Dombrowsky , Warnpraxis und Warnlogik , in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie , 1984, Jg. 13, H. 4, S. 293-307.
- ↑ What was going on there? From the commemorative publication on the 25th anniversary of Warning Office VI from 1985 on the tasks of the warning service
- ^ BfS , Institute for Atmospheric Radioactivity, Annual Report 1997, pages 77/78. (PDF; 83 kB) Archived from the original on April 19, 2014 ; accessed on January 21, 2016 .
- ↑ Ulrich van Bebber, Klaus Böhnke, Laboratory on Wheels. Nuclide-specific measuring vehicles of the warning service , in: Environment & Automobil
- ↑ Mobile nuclide-specific measuring system of the warning service for measuring soil contamination , Federal Office for Civil Defense
- ↑ Integrated measurement and information system for monitoring radioactivity - IMIS. Federal Office for Radiation Protection, accessed on January 21, 2016 .