Monroe County alert system glitch causes confusion during tornado warning
Early Wednesday morning, residents in Monroe County, Michigan, received countless alerts of a tornado warning urging them to seek shelter. Minutes later, another notification was sent with the all clear.
"All night long, just kept going off. It was so annoying. Like nonstop," said Monroe resident Justin Redmon.
The back and forth caused quite a lot of confusion across the county.
"When we got up this morning, we had at least, I'm thinking, 40 calls," Monroe resident Sue Coseo said.
Residents were flooded with multiple phone calls, emails and text messages with an alert from the Monroe County Alert Notification System between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m.
"In that instance, it becomes annoying, it becomes alarming, and also you get the chicken little syndrome, like it's not really a disaster, it's not really an emergency," said Monroe County Interim Emergency Management Director Brad Smith.
Smith tells CBS News Detroit that although a tornado never touched down, weather conditions made it possible, which prompted the alert, but there was a glitch in the system.
"We're working with the vendor to find out exactly what the situation, what the problem was, so that if it happens again, we can stop it or prevent it from being twenty, thirty, forty phone calls," Smith said.
Smith says that since the malfunction, many people have removed these notifications.
"I'm asking people not to unsubscribe for the simple fact that this was hopefully a one-and-done mistake," said Smith.
Smith says these are lifesaving alerts that he encourages everyone to have during severe weather.
"The importance of getting these messages is very simple. Time. When the alerts go out, sometimes you have minutes, sometimes it's seconds. I'd rather be notified by mistake than not notified at all," he said.
Smith says if you're a resident who unsubscribed from these alerts and would like to re-subscribe, you can do that on Monroe County's official website.