During a news conference Friday morning, officials in Los Angeles apologized for a set of erroneous alert messages that were sent to residents telling them to evacuate areas that were not impacted by wildfires.
The first emergency alert messages were sent to residents' phones on Thursday afternoon falsely telling millions they were under an evacuation warning.
RELATED STORY | All wildfires burning in LA have some level of containment for first time this week
A second alert was sent telling people to disregard the first message. The alert was intended only for residents near the Kenneth Fire that broke on Thursday near the Los Angeles County and Ventura County lines.
Then, in the early hours of Friday morning residents in Beverly Hills were falsely told to evacuate in another erroneous error message from the county's emergency alert system.
“There is an extreme amount of frustration, anger, fear with regards to the erroneous messages that have been sent out through the wireless emergency Alert System across L.A County. I can’t express enough how sorry I am for this experience,” Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan said at Friday's news conference.
Officials acknowledged that it is not feasible to ask residents to verify alerts before taking them seriously when they receive them. They also expressed concerns about people deactivating the alerts and missing critical, legitimate messages.
McGowan explained that the alerts are not being sent by an individual person but are triggered by setting a geographical area from an interface.
McGowan said his office is trying to find the root cause of the error in the sequence that connects to the cellphone towers in the region.
Donate to those impacted by the Southern California wildfires
