Los Angeles County's top emergency manager said Saturday that the county's overhaul of its emergency notification system was nearly complete after it sent out a series of erroneous emergency alerts telling millions of residents across Los Angeles to prepare to evacuate amid the ongoing firestorm to prepare.
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 bug in the software system.
County officials, he said, are working with federal and state officials and wireless carriers to ensure that outdated alerts are removed from the system so people don't continue to receive alerts that aren't intended for them.
To ensure the problem does not persist, the county on Friday began transitioning from a county-operated platform to a state system operated by the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services for all future emergency alerts that use cell phones ping a specific geographical area.
“We believe this process is largely complete and we are working with federal partners and providers to ensure erroneous alerts do not occur again,” McGowan said.
The erroneous messages that bombarded residents' phones multiple times on Thursday and Friday – including in the middle of the night – caused confusion and panic across the vast county of 10 million residents. Residents across the city were already on edge as fires broke out from the Pacific Palisades to Altadena, killing at least 13 people and damaging and destroying more than 12,000 buildings.
“This is an emergency notification from the Los Angeles County Fire Department,” the warnings said. “An evacuation warning has been issued for your area.”
McGowan blamed a software glitch for the first erroneous alarm, which went off around 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon and inadvertently triggered a statewide evacuation alert instead of a targeted alert to affected residents.
According to a preliminary assessment, the false echo alerts that continued to be issued Friday occurred as cell towers came back online after initially being taken down due to the fires, McGowan said. The outdated alerts were stored in the system and released to the public after the towers came back online.
“This was frustrating and unacceptable and the public desperately needs accurate information and we are working quickly to restore this,” McGowan said Saturday.
On Friday evening, the county announced it would suspend its current alert system, operated by a third-party provider called Genasys, and switch all local emergency alerts to the separate CalOES system while Genasys conducted tests to determine the cause of the outage.
“Our preliminary investigation indicates that a precise, targeted alarm was issued from the LA County Emergency Operations Center at approximately 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 9,” the county said in a statement late Friday. “However, after it left the EOC, the alert was mistakenly sent 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 cell phone providers, to figure out how to continue tracking the stream of faulty alarms and fix the problem.
Officials emphasized Saturday that residents will not need to sign up to receive future wireless emergency alerts under the new system.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said Saturday that cell phones in an area where an alert is required “will automatically receive the alert.” However, if residents would like further clarification or updates, they can call 211 or sign up for additional text and email alerts at Alertla.org.
McGowan said the county is also working to establish a more robust, layered notification system and improve its “two-to-one calling” network, which connects one person to two other people via telephone.
“These emergency warnings helped us evacuate hundreds of thousands of people as part of immediate life-saving measures. We have undoubtedly saved lives,” he said. “But the last few days have also reminded us that technology is vulnerable to the effects of a disaster, especially unprecedented ones.”