A city-wide evacuation alert was mistakenly sent out in Los Angeles, causing widespread confusion. The alert was quickly retracted and officials clarified that there was no active threat requiring evacuation.
Across Los Angeles , phones blared with an evacuation alert shortly before 4 p.m. Thursday. The city's Department of Emergency Management said the alert was sent 'by ERROR '. 'Evacuation orders have not changed,' the department said in an X post. Staff of the Times across the metropolitan area, from Long Beach to Echo Park and beyond, received the alert, which did not seem to discriminate by distance from any particular fire.
'This is an emergency message from the Los Angeles County Fire Department,' the notice read. 'A EVACUATION WARNING has been issued in your area.' In the press room of the Los Angeles City Emergency Operations Center, in downtown Los Angeles, phones of elected officials, employees, and a handful of journalists rang in unison. With their backs to a giant glass wall separating the press area from the center operations floor, newly sworn-in representative Luz Rivas, who had been engrossed in a conversation with her colleague George Whitesides, exclaimed that she had received the alert on her 818 number. Employees speculated if the alert was related to a nascent fire in West Hills, until a journalist with a 310 area code said she had also received the alert. At a Chipotle in Atwater Village, both customers and employees sighed and raised their phones. 'Are we going to close?', asked an employee who was cutting chicken in the back of the kitchen. 'It's a warning, not an order,' responded another employee, scanning the alert. 'If it's an order, we have to close immediately.' Then he turned to his customer: 'Black beans, right?' The alerts were linked to alertla.org, a site that had collapsed shortly after the alert was issued. The city of Santa Monica responded on X, saying the notifications did not apply there. A second alert was issued around 4:20 p.m. saying that the evacuation warning was sent by error and was intended to apply only to the Kenneth fire
EVACUATION ALERT LOS ANGELES FIRE DEPARTMENT EMERGENCY ERROR
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