About an hour ago an Emergency Alert went out for a wildfire in my area. My wife’s iPhone SE received the alert. My SE3 did not. Both have identical notification settings.
Not sure what the problem might be. I did a regular restart and a force restart. That didn’t work as a new EA just came in. Her phone got it – mine did not.
Suggestions?
Edit: Reset Network Settings did not help, either.
If that’s the case this may not help, but there is a separate section in Notifications for “Government Alerts” waaaay down at the bottom of Settings > Notifications. More info here:
Thanks – I’ve looked at that page several times.
My Notifications at the bottom are:
AMBER Alerts: On
Emergency Alerts: On
Public Safety Alerts: On
The wildfire is on the other side of town and moving away from me so I am not in immediate danger but it would be nice to have this feature work for the next fire.
You should contact your carrier. Those alerts are sent by the network.
Sure. Figured you might have, but sometimes the obvious is easy to miss (at least for me). 
So your wife’s phone and yours have idendical Government Alerts settings. Do you also share the same carrier, and were you in the same place when the notice was issued?
The Alert settings are identical (just double-checked to be certain). Same carrier and the phones were side-by-side during the alerts. I have scheduled an appt with my carrier for this afternoon.
Edit: they replaced the SIM card but there is no way to know if that fixed the problem until the next EA is sent.
I’m curious to hear if you see any change from that.
I’ve gotten this nagging suspicion that carriers have started swapping SIMs like PC supporters used to recommend rebooting Windows. When you don’t have a clue what the underlying problem really is and you cannot (or do not want to) investigate in more detail, you need a good catch-all. At times it feels to me like carriers have resorted to swapping SIMs as that catch-all.
Complete guess here, but reading this did remind me of something I hadn’t used in years.
There used to be some magic *XX key combo that would update carrier settings, though looks like you can do it through the iOS UI now. It would fix a myriad of problems having to do with connection, especially in the more rural areas I was usually in.
Note the Apple page mentions that a new SIM requires reloading the carrier settings, so perhaps swapping the SIM will fix the problem, while underneath the carrier settings were also updated.
Update:
We just had a series of Emergency Alerts for Flash Flooding (because of the previously mentioned wildfire, above) in our area. Again, my wife’s iPhone SE got the alert; my iPhone SE3 did not.
I had both phones in front of me at the time as I was doing the iOS 15.6 upgrade. I had finished with both phones just a few minutes earlier.
It would appear that replacing the SIM card had no effect on getting alerts.
Edit:
After missing three Emergency Alerts on my phone that were received on my wifes phone, I finally got an Alert. Here is what I did prior to receiving that alert.
An Apple Support page (which I cannot find now) said to TURN OFF Emergency Alerts and Public Safety Alerts and then TURN OFF the phone. Restart the phone and then TURN ON the ALERTS.
Now I get to wait until the next set of Alerts arrive (in a day? Week? Month?) to see if this really fixed it.
I only had to wait a day to test – and my iPhone failed to receive the alert while the other phone did receive it. Again – both iPhones use Verizon and are on the same plan. Both phones are in the same location and have identical settings.
I’ve done a lot of searching online about this topic and it seems to happen to a lot of people and is not confined to any one carrier. I’ve tried all the offered solutions but nothing seems to really work.
I’ve run out of ideas.
Sounds like you might be down to calling Apple Support. Sorry!
I continue to educate myself on how WEA works. After browsing FCC and FEMA sites I found some interesting keywords defining the different levels of WEA. Plugging those terms into a search box found this informative article from Verizon:
https://www.verizon.com/support/wireless-emergency-alerts-compatible-devices/
For the events of the past few days (Flash Flood Warnings) we have been outside – but close to – the boundary. So my iPhone SE3 has better geo-targeting than the iPhone SE 2016. That may account for why one phone but not the other receives alerts.
For the previous events (fast moving wildfire) I do not know where the geo-targeting boundary was located.
I now know more about WEA that I ever thought I would need.