After a second round of false alerts rattled Los Angeles County, officials in charge of notifying Angelenos about life threatening dangers are handing responsibility for distribution of evacuation alerts over to the State.
The alerts are used to notify residents of evacuation warnings and orders when any of the fast moving and devastating fires comes close to their location. Los Angeles County has had two failures of its emergency alert system. The first sent an evacuation notice to every resident in the county instead of a targeted population. The second resent multiple old alerts days after they were first issued.
Kevin McGowan, Director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management said in the first incident, County staff were not at fault. He said they correctly entered the geographic area for the alert but the software malfunctioned.
“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. However, after it left the EOC, the alert was erroneously sent out to nearly 10 million residents across the County,” he said. “Genasys, a vendor that operates the software for the County’s emergency alert messaging, is part of our review and is conducting testing to determine how the original notification was sent far outside the intended geographic area. The company said Friday it has added safeguards to its software.”
He said in the second incident, old alerts were stored in cellphone towers that had been taken offline due to the fire and when those towers powered up, they were sent out at that time.
“We've been working tirelessly with FEMA, the FCC, the state and our region's telecommunications providers, and we've made the preliminary determination that the echo alerts happened as cell towers came back online after they were knocked offline due to this disaster,” he said. “The outdated alerts were cached in the system, and as they came back online, started being released to the public. We are very grateful to our federal and state partners who are working with the cell phone providers to make sure that all of these outdated alerts are flushed from the cell phone towers so that this ceases. We believe this process is largely complete, and we are working with our federal partners and the providers to ensure that there is not a reoccurrence of the alerts going out in air.”
Despite the investigation and promises of safeguards from the software company, the County will now utilize a different system managed by the State of California to issue alerts. The County system is already connected to the State’s network and can actively issue emergency notifications in coordination with the state utilizing the state system.
“With the agreement and support of the state CalOES director, we are switching all local emergency notifications to the CalOES alert system until we have assurances that this problem will not be repeated,” said McGowan.
The announcement came as fires continued to burn and despite increasing containment numbers, hundreds of thousands of residents continue to be in danger.
Cal Fire incident Manager Todd Hopkins said that the Palisades Fire is now over 21,000 acres driven by a thousand acre increase predominantly in the Madaville Canyon. The fire exploded overnight surging toward the Brentwood neighborhood and forcing an entirely new round of evacuations.
Firefighters have been able to utilize the nearby Encino Reservoir for consistent air support on the new fire front.
“Approximately 100 engines were searched into that area for direct suppression efforts, infrastructure, defense,” he said. “Six night flying helicopters were utilized all night, and additional night flying resources were also ordered. It was an approximate 1000 acres in growth last night in the Mandeville Canyon area, early estimates from an airborne reconnaissance indicate approximately 5,316 structures have been destroyed.”
He said “structures” does not mean homes but includes RVs, sheds and other kinds of structure. He said firefighters have hand counted about 426 destroyed homes but those efforts have only just begun.
Sheriff Robert Luna said his department has only just begun search and recover efforts in areas where it is now safe to do so.
“Through Unified Command, the department has committed 40 members of its specialized search and rescue teams to work jointly with our partners at Los Angeles County Fire Urban Search and Rescue Team, the coroner's office for LA County, FEMA, the Office of Emergency Services and the use of cadaver dogs to search for remains and reunite families. They will conduct systematic grid searches that will commence this morning to locate missing persons and reunite families. Due to safety concerns we are unable to safely search the impacted areas during the hours of darkness. So this will only be taking place while there's light.”
Officials do have the ability to send out notifications to any cellphone, regardless of setting up an account but residents can also actively signup for alerts. Residents who have not signed up for emergency alerts can do so at https://ready.lacounty.gov/emergency-notifications/. Santa Monica also issues alerts can residents can sign up for those at https://www.santamonica.gov/process-explainers/how-to-sign-up-for-sm-alerts. Residents can also call 211 for more help.
