Residents angry after false evacuation alarm

Sven Fröhlich / watson.de

Wildfires are still raging in and around Los Angeles. Sheriff Robert Luna said at a press conference that the affected areas looked as if “an atomic bomb had been dropped.”

Since Tuesday, a total of five large fires have broken out in the catchment area of ​​the US metropolis, which were fanned by strong winds and spread rapidly.

According to fire officials, 14,160 hectares of land and 10,000 buildings had already been destroyed or damaged by Friday. At least ten people were killed. The weather service AccuWeather estimates the total damage at 135 to 150 billion dollars.

On Thursday afternoon, just before 4 p.m. local time, the already nervous residents received another shock. A text message alert was mistakenly sent to all cell phones in Los Angeles County – to nearly 10 million people. It says the fire is close and people should prepare for an evacuation.

Los Angeles: False alarm for ten million people

The BBC quoted a victim, Rebecca Alvarez-Petit, who was on a video call when her phone started ringing. Each of her colleagues received the same message. “It was like a huge panic that I saw in real time,” Alvarez-Petit said. The text message read:

Los Angeles County corrected the erroneously issued message in another text message at 4:21 p.m. The original warning only applied to residents of Calabasas and Agoura Hills, which are near the Kenneth Fire in Woodland Hills.

The mistake left Alvarez-Petit stunned. “We’re all sitting on pins and needles, anxiously sitting in front of our phones, staring at the TV, with the radio on – trying to stay as informed as we can because there’s no good system,” she told the BBC. “And then this. That can’t be true.”

Kevin McGowan, director of the County of Los Angeles Office of Emergency Management, told the “Los Angeles Times» that after the malfunction became known, the Office of Emergency Management and the District Emergency Operations Center took action to “initiate a cancellation and issue a second emergency alert to correct the misinformation resulting from the malfunction.”

Some users on social media said they received a second evacuation warning shortly after 5 p.m. – immediately followed by another correction.

Many other posts then complained about the unnecessary mass hysteria that could lead to panic on the streets.