Latest news with #IPAWS
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Climate
- Daily Mail
Critical mistake made by county officials during Texas floods that could have saved countless lives
Officials in the Texas county where more than 100 people have died from the July 4 flash flood did not use technology that would have sent Amber Alert-like messages to everyone in the vicinity of the Guadalupe River, according to a bombshell new report. Kerr County officials did not use the more powerful notification tool they had even after a National Weather Service meteorologist warned them about the potential for catastrophic risk, per The Washington Post. The meteorologist, identified as Jason Runyen, posted his warnings in a Slack channel that local officials and reporters were in. He was unfortunately proven right. In the early morning hours of July 4 the river rose at least 30 feet in Hunt, Texas, near where Camp Mystic was. More than two dozen children and staff from the all-girl Christian summer camp were killed. Across the county, about 160 people thought to be washed away by the flood remain missing. Experts say Kerr County officials could have used the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, to save more people who were in bed sleeping at the time the waters were rising. IPAWS are similar to Amber Alerts in that they force phones to vibrate and emit a loud, jarring tone as long as they're on and have a signal. Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches emergency management, told the Post that local authorities not sending IPAWS messages to targeted areas was a critical mistake. The National Weather Service did send alerts to Kerr County through IPAWS, but Sadiq argued that if they had also come from local officials, residents would have trusted them more and perhaps listened. 'If the alert had gone out, there might be one or two people who might have still been able to receive that message, who now, through word of mouth, alert people around them,' Sadiq said. He spoke about the phenomenon of people in frequently-flooded areas like this area of Texas ignoring alerts because they come so often. And usually, they amount to not that much. The National Weather Service issued 22 alerts through IPAWS on July 4, and each message used increasingly dire language. County officials, though, also have the added knowledge of the area that federal weather forecasters might not. If they had sent IPAWS alerts earlier, they could have described risks to certain neighborhoods or provided more specific guidance on how to stay safe, experts said. Instead, county officials used a more limited warning system called CodeRED. When activated, it send voice messages to landlines listed in the White Pages and text messages to cellphones of people who have signed up, the Post reported. Some locals didn't get CodeRED messages until 10:55am, according to screenshots obtained by the Post. That was over five hours after the river reached its highest recorded level. It's unclear why Kerr County leaders opted not to use IPAWS in the early stages of the July 4 natural disaster, especially when they've used it in the past to warn about much less dangerous threats. William B. 'Dub' Thomas, Kerr County's emergency management coordinator, used IPAWS last July to warn that the Guadalupe River could rise four feet, the Post reported. The alert told residents to avoid low-level river crossings and move their belongings away from the river. That flash flood came and went with no major injuries. Kerr County officials did eventually use IPAWS; it was activated on July 6, two days after the worst of the flooding. That alert was sent out because they were worried about another round of rising water levels. Daily Mail approached Thomas for comment on the disaster response. A communications team representing state and local officials said in a statement to the Post that county leaders are focused primarily on rescue and reunification and are 'committed to a transparent and full review of processes and protocols.' This revelation that IPAWS went unused comes as Kerr County officials are facing harsher scrutiny as time goes on. During a Tuesday press conference, one reporter asked Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha if anyone at emergency management office had been awake to push a button to send an emergency alert. Leitha snapped back, 'Sir, it's not that easy to just push a button. And we've told you several times.'
NBC News
17 hours ago
- Climate
- NBC News
FEMA records show Kerr County didn't alert all cell phones as flooding began
FEMA records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates show that Kerr County officials did not use FEMA's Integrated Public Alert & Warning System to send warnings with safety instructions to all mobile phones in the affected area during critical hours as the flooding began on July 4. Researchers who have studied the cell phone warning system told NBC 5 Investigates that policies on how and when to issue critical alerts vary widely from one county to another, potentially risking delays when seconds count. As the search for the missing continues in Kerr County, records reviewed by NBC 5 Investigates raise new questions about whether local officials could have used the nation's wireless emergency alert system to better warn people in the flood's path. Along with our partners at NBC News, we scoured a FEMA archive of cell phone alerts sent through FEMA's integrated public alert and warning system, or IPAWS. IPAWS is a system that many local counties, including Kerr County, are authorized to use to issue warnings to all cell phones in a designated area. It's the same system used to send Amber Alerts. The FEMA message archive shows that as the water began rising in Kerr County on July 4, the National Weather Service sent an IPAWS flood warning to cell phones as early as 1:14 a.m. However, weather service forecasters cannot issue instructions on whether to evacuate or wait for rescue; those messages are up to county or city officials. The FEMA archive showed that Kerr County did not send any wireless alerts through IPAWS on July 4, when the flooding began. Some families said they did receive a CodeRed alert from Kerr County, which is similar to an IPAWS message. But CodeRed only reaches people who signed up for alerts. 'Most of the people I've talked to didn't even know what CodeRed was,' said Kerr County resident Louis Kocurek. Louis and Leslie Kocurek shared a screenshot of a Kerr County dispatch CodeRed message they received, saying major flooding continues. However, the Kocureks said that the message didn't reach their phones until after 10 a.m. By then, one flood gauge in Kerr County showed the river had already risen about 30 feet, and the Kocureks had taken a photo showing that roads in their neighborhood were already cut off. 'I'm mad because, you know, like I told another lady, how many lives do we have to lose in order for them to fix the system? It's broken,' said Leslie Kocurek. Kerr County has used the wider-reaching IPAWS system to warn of flooding in the past. Last year, on July 23, the archive showed the county sent an IPAWS alert saying the Guadalupe River was 'expected to rise an additional 4 feet,' telling people to 'avoid the river' and 'move assets to higher ground immediately.' So why no county IPAWS alert before the flood this time? NBC 5 Investigates reached out to Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly and emergency management coordinator William Thomas, but they did not immediately respond to questions. At a news conference last week, Kelly was asked why children's camps along the river were not evacuated. 'I can't answer that, I don't know,' said Kelly, adding that they never expected water would rise so fast. 'We didn't know this flood was coming. Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,' Kelly said. Researchers who have studied the IPAWS system told NBC 5 Investigates that communities across the country sometimes struggle to decide when to issue cell phone alerts, who should issue those alerts, and what the messages should say. The struggle stems, they said, in part from a lack of standardized nationwide policies. 'There is no required training. There's no certification process currently within IPAWS,' said Jeannette Sutton, an emergency alert researcher who explained it's up to each local government to write its own policies. That methodology, she said, has created differences in how effectively the system is used in each community. 'We need a lot of training, and we need the resources to help people to get trained,' said Sutton. Sutton's team at the University at Albany recently helped FEMA develop a tool for local emergency managers to use to pre-plan more effective messages before disaster strikes. 'They are generally facing a blank text box that says, 'insert message here.' And you can imagine that in a situation where there's a lot of stress and uncertainty, that writing a message from scratch is very difficult,' said Sutton. In a statement to NBC 5, FEMA said its IPAWS office '..encourages and supports practicing and exercising..' and said the agency makes training tools available '...enabling public safety officials to gain confidence using IPAWS.' 'It is really important to get it right when people's lives are on the line,' said Sutton. Sutton said cell phone alerts can be critical, especially in places like Kerr County, which doesn't have a siren warning system. But she said counties should also amplify alerts using tools like social media or even knocking on doors, as cell phone service is sometimes spotty in rural areas. On the morning of the July 4 floods, the Kerr County Sheriff's Department did use its Facebook account, posting messages around 5:30 a.m. warning of 'dangerous flooding' and urging people to 'move to higher ground.' Those messages could have reached social media users who happened to be awake and looking at Facebook, but they would not sound an alert on a phone like an IPAWS message. At a news conference Wednesday, the sheriff said the county would look into whether evacuation orders should have been issued. 'Sometimes, evacuation is not the safest. Sometimes it's better to shelter in place,' said Sheriff Larry Leitha. The sheriff also pledged to examine why cell phone alerts did not happen sooner. 'Those are important questions. Those are, we will answer those questions,' said Leitha.
2 days ago
- General
Kerr County officials waited 90 minutes to send emergency alert after requested, dispatch audio shows
At 4:22 a.m. on Friday, as Texas' Hill Country began to flood, a firefighter in Ingram – just upstream from Kerrville – asked the Kerr County Sheriff's Office to alert nearby residents, according to audio obtained by ABC affiliate KSAT. But Kerr County officials took nearly six hours to heed this call. "The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39," the firefighter said in the dispatch audio. "Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?" "Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor," a Kerr County Sheriff's Office dispatcher replied. The first alert didn't come through Kerr County's CodeRED system until 90 minutes later. Some messages didn't arrive until after 10 a.m. By then, hundreds of people had been swept away by the floodwaters. Kerr County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At a Wednesday morning press conference, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha declined to answer a question about delayed emergency alerts, saying that an "after-action" would follow the search and rescue efforts. "Those questions are gonna be answered," he added. Records show Kerr County's CodeRED Emergency Notification System, which alerts subscribers to emergencies through pre-recorded phone messages, has been in place for at least a decade. When CodeRED was first introduced by Kerr County and the City of Kerrville in 2014, a government press release claimed it could "notify the entire City / County about emergency situations in a matter of minutes." CodeRED relied on the local white pages for users' contact information, the announcement explained, so "no one should assume his or her number is included." Residents had to sign up to ensure they would receive alerts. In 2021, Kerr County incorporated FEMA's Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) into CodeRED, so that messages could reach tourists and others not in the local database. The IPAWS system allows local officials to broadcast emergency messages and send text blasts to all phones in the area. At the time, some county officials weren't sure about the change. "What's the benefit?" Kerr County Commissioner Jonathan Letz asked at a May 2021 commissioners' meeting. "It's just another avenue for us to notify people when we have an emergency," replied Emergency Management Coordinator William "Dub" Thomas. Then-Commissioner Harley David Belew voted against adding IPAWS to the CodeRED system after noting that it would require switching out the county's equipment, which he said he'd done recently because of a federal policy change a few years earlier. "I don't think it's going to change anything," Belew said. Despite these doubts, Kerr County began using IPAWS alongside its CodeRED system in 2021. When the area flooded on Friday, Ingram City Council Member Ray Howard told ABC News he got three flash flood alerts from the National Weather Service, but none from Kerr County authorities. On Monday, Belew went on The Michael Berry Show to discuss the catastrophic flooding. On the show, he said Kerr County Commissioners had considered putting in an early warning system years earlier, but that there weren't enough cell towers to reach rural parts of the county, "so that idea was scrapped." Records show that the topic of a flood warning system for Kerr County came up in at least 20 different county commissioners' meetings since it was first introduced in 2016 – months before Belew joined the Court. Belew explained on the radio show that funding for a warning system was also a barrier to implementation, echoing issues he raised at the time, according to meeting minutes. But even after last week's tragic flooding, Belew expressed concern over spending on such a system: "God only knows what's going to happen, what kind of government waste we might get going into an alert system," he said on Monday's segment. "But if we can get any early alert system for the future, that'd give people some peace of mind here," Belew added. "It's always been needed."
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mass Notification Systems Market Worth Over US$ 46.43 Billion By 2033
Robust regulations, relentless disasters, smart-city investments, and AI-enabled innovations position North America as market leader, Europe as compliance-driven contender, and rapidly urbanizing, hazard-prone Asia Pacific as the fastest-growing frontier for mass notification systems globally. Chicago, May 19, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global mass notification systems market was valued at US$ 14.62 billion in 2024 and is anticipated to reach US$ 46.43 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 13.7% during the forecast period 2025–2033. In the United States, regulators remain the single biggest catalyst pushing the mass notification systems market into mainstream critical-infrastructure budgets., the Federal Emergency Management Agency has broadened access to the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS); its public dashboard shows 87,000 separate warning messages disseminated during calendar-year 2023, up from 71,000 in 2022. Furthermore, 1,480 federal, state and tribal alerting authorities now hold IPAWS certificates, creating a dense foundation for commercial platform vendors to plug into. Simultaneously, Canada's Alert Ready program logged 1,216 alert activations in 2023, many related to record-breaking wildfires in Alberta and Nova Scotia. Local television override tests further proved sub-five-second dissemination latencies. Request Sample Pages: Outside North America, the European Union's European Electronic Communications Code has taken full effect in the mass notification systems market, obliging the 27 member states to implement either cell broadcast or location-based SMS for public warnings. By March 2024, the European Commission confirmed operational cell-broadcast transmitters in 350 national and regional sites, with France, Germany and Spain accounting for nearly half of the active nodes. In the Asia-Pacific region, India's National Disaster Management Authority partnered with the Centre for Development of Telematics to roll out a Common Alerting Protocol gateway covering 33 states; pilot runs in August 2023 pushed 146 million multilingual test alerts in a single afternoon, underlining the scale regulators now expect from modern platforms. Key Findings in the Mass Notification Systems Market Market Forecast (2033) US$ 46.43 billion CAGR 13.7% Largest Region (2024) North America (34.0%) By Component Solution (81.30%) By Application Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (42.20%) By Deployment Cloud (53%) By Industry Government And Defense Sector (30.80%) By Organization Large Enterprises (73.5%) By Type In-Building (50.9%) Top Drivers Nationwide emergency alert mandates expanding compliance requirements across jurisdictions rapidly. Increased multi-channel device penetration enabling ubiquitous reach for critical communications. Heightened climate disasters driving enterprise investment in resilient notification infrastructure Top Trends Nationwide emergency alert mandates expanding compliance requirements across jurisdictions rapidly. Increased multi-channel device penetration enabling ubiquitous reach for critical communications. Heightened climate disasters driving enterprise investment in resilient notification infrastructure Top Challenges Nationwide emergency alert mandates expanding compliance requirements across jurisdictions rapidly. Increased multi-channel device penetration enabling ubiquitous reach for critical communications. Heightened climate disasters driving enterprise investment in resilient notification infrastructure Enterprise Resilience Mandates Propel Cloud-Native Platforms And AI-Driven Orchestration Capabilities Corporate risk managers are no longer treating emergency communications as an optional insurance policy; instead the capability is becoming a core pillar of enterprise resilience charters, giving a boost to the mass notification systems market. According to SEC Form 10-K filings, Everbridge supported 6,530 paying customers at the close of Q1 2024 and processed 3.2 billion individual voice, text, email and mobile-app notifications during 2023. Meanwhile, private-equity-backed OnSolve reported 2.5 billion message deliveries across 190 countries last year, and rising inflows from logistics, technology and energy verticals. This volume illustrates that large employers have moved from isolated building-level alarms to globally coordinated cloud services that sit directly on top of HR systems such as Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. The value proposition extends beyond life-safety compliance. Technology manufacturer in the mass notification systems market Bosch saved an audited eight hours per incident after integrating AlertMedia with its MES dashboards, as automated shelter-in-place instructions traveled to 9,400 shop-floor smartwatches in under 12 seconds. In healthcare, AdventHealth deployed Singlewire Informacast across 57 hospitals, stitching nurse call, fire panels and metal detectors into a unified incident-response workflow; board minutes show a 39-minute reduction in average code-black cycle time, freeing operating rooms faster. These concrete operational gains are resonating with CFOs and explain why Gartner counted 550 net-new enterprise deployments in 2023 alone, with financial services, manufacturing and higher education leading in ticket volume across global helpdesk queues last year. Telecommunications Evolution Unlocks 5G, Cell Broadcast And IoT Alert Expansion Rapid advances in telecommunications are enlarging the physical reach and technical richness of the mass notification systems market. Fifth-generation (5G) standalone networks—now live in 172 countries according to the GSMA's April 2024 update—support cell broadcast throughput over 2,000 characters and rich media attachments. Verizon's Phoenix pilot in October 2023 demonstrated the capability by pushing 22,000 bilingual evacuation alerts with embedded dynamic maps to subscribers located inside a 1.6-mile polygon, all within nine seconds. The test, achieved on a public network slice, proved that broadcast alerts can coexist with latency-sensitive traffic such as autonomous shuttle telemetry without congestion. Regulators have taken notice and are drafting service-level targets accordingly. Concurrently, Internet-of-Things growth is escalating the number of machines that can both generate and receive alerts in the mass notification systems market. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that 1.1 million network-connected fire panels were operational in US commercial buildings at the end of 2023, each capable of publishing Common Alerting Protocol feeds directly to cloud dashboards. On the receive side, Apple's iOS 17 Safety Check now consumes CAP messages natively, adding roughly 1.4 billion devices to the global alertable footprint. As telcos, handset vendors and sensor manufacturers standardize around 3GPP and OASIS specifications, platform providers gain unprecedented pathways to deliver hyper-localized, multimedia warnings at population scale. Adopters forecast that sensor-to-human alert loops will contract to under three seconds by 2026. Cross-Industry Case Studies Demonstrate Tangible Risk Mitigation And Productivity Gains Concrete field deployments reveal how well-designed notification workflows translate into measurable risk mitigation. When a wind-driven grass fire threatened the outskirts of Calgary in August 2023, the city's Everbridge-powered Alberta Emergency Alert system issued 10 sequential shelter directives and evacuation orders to 1.4 million residents. Fire command later confirmed zero civilian casualties and a 25-minute improvement in perimeter clearance compared with a similarly sized 2020 event that relied on sirens and social media alone. In the United States, Penn State University's multi-channel alerting platform reached 125,000 students across 24 campuses during an active-shooter hoax in October 2023, calming rumors by countering false TikTok videos within four minutes. Industrial environments show comparable value in the mass notification systems market. Jaguar Land Rover's Solihull plant in the UK integrated OnSolve with SCADA alarms and dispatch logs. In 2023 the site recorded 17 unplanned chemical releases; in each case, digital instructions were sent to 5,200 employees in fewer than 15 seconds, and post-event audits documented 680 fewer lost production hours compared with 2022. Airlines are also leaning in: Lufthansa moved 132,000 crew members to a Singlewire backbone that ties gate changes, severe weather alerts and union negotiations into a single feed. By centralizing notifications the carrier shaved five minutes off its average aircraft turnaround time—a critical metric now that European slots are fully subscribed. Regulators cite outcomes in best-practice guidance worldwide. Competitive Landscape Shows Consolidation, Vertical Specialization, And Venture Capital Momentum As demand accelerates, the competitive dynamics of the mass notification systems market are reshaping. From January 2020 through March 2024, PitchBook logged 14 acquisitions focused on emergency communications, with larger suites buying niche specialists in acoustic sensors, multilanguage text-to-speech and threat intelligence. The most recent example arrived in February 2024, when Motorola Solutions folded Edgybees' geospatial video analytics into its Rave Mobile Safety division to enrich situational-awareness overlays. Private capital remains equally active; Crunchbase data shows venture and growth funds have injected $420 million into notification and incident-management startups since 2020, led by a $170 million Series D for AlertMedia in May 2023. Horizontal consolidation is matched by deeper vertical specialization in the mass notification systems market. Raptor Technologies now dominates K-12 education with its Raptor Alert product installed in 10,200 US schools, while Vocera (now part of Stryker) focuses on hospital nurse-call integrations covering 1,950 medical facilities. At the platform layer, differentiation centers on AI. Everbridge's Risk Intelligence Service parses 45,000 open-source data feeds and delivers pre-built impact assessments in 16 languages, whereas OnSolve's Real-Time Risk solution computes storm-track polygons every two minutes using NOAA radar. The net effect is an ecosystem where buyers can select between all-in-one suites and specialized vertical offerings, yet still expect interoperability via open CAP, WebHooks and REST APIs, driving procurement cycles that increasingly favor flexible subscription consumption models today. Technology Convergence With Security, GIS And Analytics Generates New Revenue The current innovation cycle in the mass notification systems market is characterized by convergence between mass notification, physical security and advanced analytics. Out of the top 15 video-management-software vendors ranked by Omdia, 12 had shipped documented REST or MQTT bridges to notification platforms by Q4 2024. Genetec, for instance, now allows camera analytics that detect crowd crush to trigger OnSolve alerts without operator intervention. Similarly, LenelS2's BlueDiamond mobile access control shares badge swipe anomalies with Everbridge, automatically escalating anomalies to global security operations centers when employee counts exceed maximum occupancy thresholds. This bidirectional flow of data eliminates manual phone trees and slashes mean time to acknowledge events to under one minute across benchmarked pilots. Geospatial intelligence adds another layer of value to the growth of the mass notification systems market. Esri and Google Maps Platform each launched turn-key mass-alert toolkits in 2023, enabling emergency managers to draw incident zones and instantly preview population counts, evacuation routes and ADA-compliant facilities. Analytics companies are also entering the fray: Palantir's Foundry integrates with Singlewire to correlate supply-chain disruptions against supplier density maps, helping manufacturers reroute cargo pre-emptively. Monetization extends beyond software licenses; Verizon is bundling prioritized network slices for public-safety notifications, while device makers such as Garmin embed satellite SOS subscriptions. Collectively, these linkages create new revenue touchpoints that go far beyond one-time platform fees, reinforcing the market's resilience against pure-play commoditization with insurance and infrastructure partners emerging. Deployment Challenges Include Interoperability, Alert Fatigue, Privacy And Compliance Hurdles Despite rapid growth and cloud based deployments are not without obstacles in the mass notification systems market. The International Telecommunications Union recorded 704 documented false or erroneous public alerts worldwide between 2019 and 2023, including the well-publicized Hawaii ballistic missile false alarm. Such incidents erode citizen trust and magnify so-called alert fatigue—a phenomenon the World Health Organization equates to 'warning desensitization.' Enterprise environments feel the strain as well; Ford's 2023 internal audit uncovered 220 cases where employees disabled mobile push notifications after receiving more than 15 low-priority messages in a single week. Over-communication directly undermines the primary objective of timely, actionable outreach. Several state emergency managers acknowledge diverting resources to rebuild trust campaigns. Interoperability and privacy represent additional hurdles to the growth of the mass notification systems market. Although the Common Alerting Protocol is an OASIS standard, laboratories from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute report that 77 of 210 vendor gateways tested in 2023 failed schema validation against version 1.2, often due to non-standard character encodings. Meanwhile, data-sovereignty laws are tightening. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, effective March 2024, restricts the cross-border movement of personal contact data, compelling international vendors to stand up local hosting or cede deals to domestic rivals such as Bharat Alerts. Compliance teams must therefore navigate a patchwork of retention, encryption and audit requirements without sacrificing the split-second latency that life-critical alerts demand. Vendor consortiums are drafting conformance tests to close these gaps. Browse the Table of Contents to access and purchase individual report sections: Future Outlook Highlights Predictive, Multilingual And Contextual Notifications Dominating 2024-2028 Looking ahead, the mass notification systems market is set to pivot from reactive blast messaging toward predictive and context-aware outreach. IDC projects daily emergency and operational notifications to top 25 billion by 2028, driven largely by machine-generated events. Generative AI accelerates this shift: in January 2024, AlertMedia released an OpenAI-powered editor that drafts situation reports from sensor data and local news in under three seconds, halving dispatcher workload during complex incidents. Language coverage is expanding as well; Everbridge now ships 144 pre-translated templates spanning Amharic, Tagalog and Ukrainian, reflecting migrations triggered by 195 officially cataloged natural disasters in 2023. Micro-targeting will complement volume growth in the mass notification systems market. Qualcomm's 2024 Snapdragon Satellite spec enables device-level geotracking granularity of one square meter, allowing authorities to issue evacuation orders only to homes inside a fast-moving wildfire's projected plume. At the same time, Blue Origin and SpaceX have scheduled 52 low-earth-orbit launches through 2026 that will improve latency for satellite push alerts to under one-second round-trip. Finally, public-private partnerships are maturing; the US National Weather Service will open its HazCollect APIs to private push vendors in late 2024, promising richer meteorological overlays. Taken together, these advances suggest a market entering its most transformative phase yet, where precision, speed and inclusivity define competitive success. Industry analysts anticipate new legislative mandates that will further incentivize proactive investments worldwide by 2025. Global Mass Notification Market Major Players: Siemens Everbridge Honeywell Eaton Motorola Solutions Blackboard IBM Google BlackBerry Johnson Controls Singlewire Software Rave Mobile Safety American Signal Corporation (ASC) ATI Systems Regroup Mass Notification AlertMedia KONEXUS CrisisGo Netpresenter Omnilert Ruvna F24 Alertus Mircom Iluminar Omingo Klaxon Technologies OnSolve Crises Control Voyent Alert! Squadcast Other Prominent Players Key Segmentation: By Component: Solution Services By Deployment: On Premise Cloud Based By Application: Public Alert & Warning Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Others By Organization: Large enterprises Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) By Type: In-Building Wide Area Distributed Recipient By Industry: BFSI Energy and Utilities Education Healthcare Government and Defense Transportation and logistics Others By Region: North America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa (MEA) South America Have Questions? Reach Out Before Buying: About Astute Analytica Astute Analytica is a global market research and advisory firm providing data-driven insights across industries such as technology, healthcare, chemicals, semiconductors, FMCG, and more. We publish multiple reports daily, equipping businesses with the intelligence they need to navigate market trends, emerging opportunities, competitive landscapes, and technological advancements. With a team of experienced business analysts, economists, and industry experts, we deliver accurate, in-depth, and actionable research tailored to meet the strategic needs of our clients. At Astute Analytica, our clients come first, and we are committed to delivering cost-effective, high-value research solutions that drive success in an evolving marketplace. Contact Us:Astute AnalyticaPhone: +1-888 429 6757 (US Toll Free); +91-0120- 4483891 (Rest of the World)For Sales Enquiries: sales@ Follow us on: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube CONTACT: Contact Us: Astute Analytica Phone: +1-888 429 6757 (US Toll Free); +91-0120- 4483891 (Rest of the World) For Sales Enquiries: sales@ Website: in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
13-05-2025
- Politics
LA County wildfire alert mistakenly sent to millions due to tech glitch
LOS ANGELES -- A technological glitch caused an emergency alert to be mistakenly sent to millions of Los Angeles County residents in January rather than only those in the proximity of a wildfire, according to a congressional report. The mistaken alert on Jan. 9 came as residents were on edge two days after fierce winds and deadly wildfires ripped across Los Angeles County hillsides and burned through communities. The alert message was only supposed to go to residents in the San Fernando Valley facing an evacuation warning due to the Kenneth Fire. The report issued Monday by Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach found that Los Angeles County officials properly coded the alert to reach the wireless devices of a more limited group of people. But the alert was sent to residents across the county of 10 million people, and without specific geographic information, prompting concern and confusion after two days of devastating wildfires. That's because the coding for the precise location didn't get saved into the IPAWS federal channel for local emergency alerts, which software provider Genasys believed might be due to a network disruption, the report said. 'The initial false alert is believed to be caused by technology issues with third-party technology vendor Genasys,' the report said. The report did not address how emergency alerts were handled in the Eaton and Palisades fires. In the Eaton Fire in Altadena, evacuation orders went out long after houses were reported burning. LA County officials have launched their own independent review, led by a third party, of evacuation policies and the emergency alert system. An initial report released last month said nearly three dozen people who responded to the fires had been interviewed and more interviews were planned. The next report on the review is expected by July 27. In the Palisades fire, residents said they received notification about the blaze on their phones well after they could see it coming and decided on their own to leave, reporting by The Associated Press found. Garcia's report suggested that Los Angeles County officials could use more location-specific language in the text of warnings so residents know where they are intended for, and the need for enhanced training and standardized software to prevent issues like the faulty alert issued in connection with the Kenneth Fire. 'The lessons from the Kenneth Fire should not only inform reforms, but serve as a catalyst to modernize the nation's alerting infrastructure before the next disaster strikes,' the report said.
