JeffComm 911 looking into why alert was mistakenly sent to 400K residents
An emergency alert that was mistakenly sent to hundreds of thousands of people in Jefferson County over the weekend is under review.
"The Lakewood Police has issued a shelter in place order," the message said.
Will Baldwin got the voicemail just after midnight Sunday morning.
"The first thing I thought of was, 'We have a very high fire danger up here,'" he said.
Baldwin lives in Evergreen, several miles from the Lakewood neighborhood the alert was meant for.
"Only about 25 people were identified to receive this, and the operator, once it was sent out, noticed it was much greater than that," said Michael Brewer, deputy director for Jefferson County 911.
Roughly 400,000 people got that alert instead.
Brewer says the alert system uses geo-fencing to target the area of the emergency. In this case, those boundaries never went up.
"Initial indications are that everybody was following the appropriate protocols, so it's really unknown," Brewer said.
While they work to determine how it happened, Brewer says they are also navigating a wave of distrust the error caused in the community.
"That's our major concern is that it degrades the confidence in the public safety system," Brewer said. "That's incredibly disheartening because we work so hard to be able to provide the best data to our citizens."
For Baldwin, it was simply a surprise,
While he hopes the kinks are worked out soon, Brewer says he's relieved to know he's in the system at all.
"They can wake me up anytime," he said. "I'd rather it be an error than them skip me."
