The erroneous evacuation alert that was transmitted across Los Angeles County this week, sparking panic as wildfires continued to rage out of control, was sent to nearly 10 million people, emergency officials said on Friday — roughly the entire population of the county.
The alert was supposed to target residents in the area of the West Hills neighborhood, which was threatened by the Kenneth fire. Instead, it blared on cellphones across Los Angeles County on Thursday night and, for some, several times on Friday.
The county is the most populous in the nation, with 9.6 million people, equal to nearly 3 percent of the U.S. population.
The fires’ effects on cellphone towers could have caused the problem, officials said, calling the error a “serious breach of public trust.”
The failure has led public safety officials to fear false panic — or perhaps worse, that residents might ignore future, accurate alerts because they’d become accustomed to false warnings.
The county’s emergency management office said in a statement that it had sent an “accurate, correctly-targeted alert” on Thursday, but that it somehow went far beyond its intended audience. After the initial error, the county said, “echoes” of that alert — carrying an identical warning message — arrived on cellphones throughout Friday.
The county used Genasys, an emergency communications company, to send the alert, and said the company was part of its review of what went wrong.
Lauren Ames, a spokeswoman for Genasys, said earlier on Friday that the company was working with the county to “identify the cause” of the problem. “While we have not been able to replicate this error, we have added safeguards into the software to ensure this cannot happen within our platform,” she said.
County emergency officials said they would be using the alert system used by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to send future notifications until they figured out what went wrong.
Brittney Mendez, 27, was one of many people who began preparing to flee when she received the alert on her phone on Thursday evening. It said an “evacuation warning has been issued in your area” and told her to “gather loved ones, pets, and supplies.”
She called her mother and grandmother, got her three dogs ready to go and began packing to leave her home in the Reseda neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley.
“I just started thinking about what I could live without and what I couldn’t live without,” she said. A second alert was issued about 20 minutes later, telling recipients to disregard the evacuation notice. “It was horrible, for those 20 minutes, as I was gathering my life together,” Ms. Mendez said.
Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency management office, initially said at a news conference on Friday that officials did not know why the warning had gone out to people who didn’t need to receive it. He said officials were struggling to stop the notification from continuing to blare on people’s phones.
The false alert was “not being activated or initiated by a person,” he said at the time, blaming an unknown technical glitch that officials had not yet been able to identify and fix.
Mr. McGowan pleaded with people not to disable the emergency notifications on their phones, saying that accurate alerts had already saved lives this week. Even as he was speaking, the emergency alert sound could be heard from someone’s phone nearby.
Kathryn Barger, the chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, vowed to get to the bottom of what had gone wrong and expressed concern for Los Angeles County residents. “They’re on pins and needles, thinking that they’re next,” she said.
Ms. Barger said some people might have received the erroneous alert on Friday because cellphone towers that had gone offline were powering back up. She compared the situation to sending an email without internet service; the message could go into a “drafts” folder and be sent automatically once the computer reconnected to the internet.
“My question is, why can’t we turn it off?” she said. “And the answers we’re getting are not satisfying. I’m not making any excuses. It’s unacceptable. And it is frustrating, because we are asking people to trust us, to believe us when we say, ‘Evacuate.’”
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