‘This was an emergency’: Daughter of missing senior wants changes to how Silver Alerts are shared

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Peggy

The daughter of a Winnipeg senior who has been missing since December last year wants Silver Alerts to reach more people when they are issued.

Earl Moberg, 81, was last seen in the River East area on Dec. 12. He has advanced stages of dementia and his family believes he may have got lost while out on a walk.

A Silver Alert – which is used to notify people when a vulnerable senior is missing – was issued for Moberg but he hasn’t been found.

Now, his daughter Britt wants to see these alerts be issued quicker and have a further reach.

“In my father’s case, there was an alert that went out by the police that, unless you happened to be looking online at a news story that evening, you wouldn’t know that my father was missing,” said Britt.

In the weeks and months after he went missing Britt said she was still running into people in the community he lived in and they weren’t aware he was missing.

“According to Public Safety Canada, about 60 per cent of people living with dementia will go missing at some point during the course of their experience with that. If a person with Alzheimer’s disease is not found within 12 hours of being lost, there’s a 50 per cent chance that they’ll be found injured or dead from hypothermia, dehydration or drowning. That really makes any search an emergency.”

As part of a wider reach, Britt said she would want alerts to be broadcast through radio and TV, as well as be sent to people’s cellphones.

When asked about the potential concern of alert fatigue, she suggested there are ways to limit what alerts are sent and who receives them.

“How many of those (missing people over 60) will have a condition like Alzheimer’s or dementia, maybe not everyone over 60 does. So using a set of criteria for when this type of alert will be activated,” she said.

“Also being able to, what’s called geotarget an area. My father was on foot, so had a notification gone out to his community…just having a text message to the people who were within a reasonable walking distance from where my dad was, was really essential. There would have been many people who walked by him or driven by him and not known he wasn’t just out for a walk, this was an emergency.”

She said her concerns and suggestions will be taken to the National Public Alert System for consideration.

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