Bay Area experts weigh in on emergency alert mishap investigation in LA County
LOS ANGELES (KGO) -- Emergency officials in Los Angeles County are investigating why an emergency alert was sent to millions of people by mistake.
Many residents received this message around 4 p.m. Thursday of an evacuation warning, and then received a message to disregard the alert 22 minutes later.
On Friday morning the LA County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan addressed the issue after additional false alerts went out.
"There is an extreme amount of frustration, anger, fear, with regards to the erroneous messages that have been being sent out through the wireless emergency alert system across LA County," McGowan said.
"This is not human driven. There is no one sitting at a desk right now initiating emergency alerts," McGowan said.
The alert was mistakenly sent to nearly 10 million people. Genasys, a vendor that operates the software, is part of the investigation.
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In a statement put out by the county "Our preliminary assessment is that these recurring erroneous notifications are due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires' impacts on cellular towers."
Jay McAmis has been in crisis and emergency management for almost 45 years. He works for the city of San Jose now.
"Not to get too technical but not every jurisdiction is the same.," McAmis said.
McAmis said wireless emergency alert systems can be complicated. WEA are usually considered the "sledgehammer" for safety communications and utilize cell towers to distribute notifications like Amber Alerts or Silver Alerts.
"Every carrier has different parameters, you might get AT&T that has a five mile radius, Verizon might have a ten mile radius so it becomes very challenging to put messages out to target a specific area if you think about it, a ten mile circle covers a lot of terrain," McAmis said.
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Harold Schapelhouman is the retired fire chief of Menlo Park Fire District.
"Kind of the flaw in your digital device is that you know lets say at night time people leave it in another room or it's on silence. I'm still a big believer in warning sirens," Schapelhouman said.
Now in LA County, they're switching their emergency notifications to the state's emergency alert system.
"You know overall the benefit of having this you know this technology and this ability to get a warning is I think far outweighs any downside," Schapelhouman said.
Both Schapelhouman and McAmis know well the impact of a destructive wildfire.
"My family lost three homes in the Paradise fire and so - there aren't words," McAmis said.
MORE: LA fire officials urge public to keep emergency notifications on despite erroneous alerts
McAmis encourages residents in the South Bay to sign up for Alert SCC.
"We don't have near enough people signed up which is why we have all of the different tools we have to try and get as much coverage in the public as possible," McAmis said.
