Emergency officials said they did not know how an erroneous evacuation alert was sent to cellphones across Los Angeles County this week — in some cases more than once — sparking panic across a region of millions where wildfires continue to ignite and expand out of control.
The alert was supposed to target residents in the area of the West Hills neighborhood, which was threatened by the burgeoning Kenneth fire. Instead, it blared on cellphones across Los Angeles County on Thursday night and, for some, again on Friday morning.
The county is the most populous in the nation, with 9.6 million people, though it was not immediately clear how many residents had received the alert.
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.
Kevin McGowan, the director of the county’s emergency management office, acknowledged 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 they 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, 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.
Brittney Mendez, 27, was one of many people who began preparing to flee when she got 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.
Lauren Ames, a spokeswoman for Genasys, an emergency communications company whose software was used to send the alert, said the company was also trying to figure out what went wrong. “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.
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 morning 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.’”
Mike Baker contributed reporting.
