After faulty cell alerts during fire emergency, L.A. County overhauls its system
Los Angeles County’s top emergency manager said Saturday the county’s overhaul of its emergency notification system is nearly complete after it sent out a succession of faulty emergency alerts urging millions of residents across Los Angeles to prepare to evacuate amid the ongoing firestorm.
Kevin McGowan, director of L.A. County’s Office of Emergency Management, said in a morning news conference that the problem was caused by a software system glitch.
County officials, he said, are working with federal and state officials and cellphone providers to make sure that outdated alerts are flushed from the system, so people don’t continue to receive alerts not intended for them.
To ensure the issue doesn’t continue, the county on Friday began transitioning from a county-run platform to a state system, operated by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, for any future emergency alerts that ping cellphones in a designated geographic area.
“We believe this process is largely complete and we are working with federal partners and providers to ensure there is not a recurrence of the alerts going out in error,” McGowan said.
The faulty messages that bombarded residents’ phones multiple times Thursday and Friday — including in the middle of the night — stoked confusion and panic across the vast county of 10 million. Residents across the city were already on edge as fires broke out from the Pacific Palisades to Altadena, killing at least 13 and damaging and destroying more than 12,000 structures.
“This is an emergency message from the Los Angeles County Fire Department,” the alerts said. “An EVACUATION WARNING has been issued in your area.”
Emergency evacuation alerts have gone off the rails, pinging people seemingly at random. Experts say that such errors can sow mistrust in the alert system, potentially endangering residents down the line.
McGowan blamed a software glitch for the first erroneous alert that went out at around 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon, accidentally blasting a countywide evacuation alert rather than a targeted alert, to affected residents.
According to a preliminary assessment, the false echo alerts that continued to go out on Friday occurred as cell towers came back online after they were initially knocked down because of the fires, McGowan said. The outdated alerts were stored in the system and, after the towers came back online, started being released to the public.
“This has been frustrating, unacceptable and the public is in the most need of accurate information and we are moving forward rapidly to reestablish that,” McGowan said Saturday.
On Friday night, the county announced that it would suspend its current alert system, operated by a third-party vendor called Genasys, and switch all local emergency alerts to the separate CalOES system as Genasys conducted testing to determine what caused the glitch.
“Our preliminary investigation indicates that an accurate, correctly-targeted alert went out from LA County’s Emergency Operations Center at around 4 p.m. on Thursday, January 9,” the county said late Friday in a statement. “However, after it left the EOC, the alert was erroneously sent out to nearly 10 million residents across the County. “
The county is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission, in addition to cellphone providers, to figure out how the stream of faulty alerts continued to sound out and correct the problem.
Officials Saturday emphasized that residents do not need to sign up to receive any future emergency wireless alerts under the new system.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said Saturday that cellphones in an area requiring an alert will “get the alert automatically.” But if residents want further clarification or updates, they can call 211 or sign up for additional text and email alerts at alertla.org.
McGowan said the county was also working to establish a more robust, multilayered notification system and enhance its “two-on-one call” network that connects one person via phone to two other people.
“These emergency alerts helped us evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in immediate life-safety measures. We’ve undoubtedly saved lives,” he said. “But the last couple of days have also reminded us that technology is vulnerable to the impacts of a disaster, especially unprecedented ones.”
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