When notices about a boil water advisory were sent to people in the Five Cities community Wednesday, three alert systems were used: Reverse 911, AlertSLO and the Wireless Emergency Alert System (WEAS).
“Right before 8 p.m. I got a text and it said the water was contaminated and we needed to boil our water, and that was it,” said Catherine Webb of Arroyo Grande.
But not everyone was notified.
More than 280,000 people live in San Luis Obispo County; 116,000 people are registered through Reverse 911, but with AlertSLO launching in January, the county’s Emergency Services Director, Scott Jalbert, says only 6,500 people are currently signed up with that notification system.
“If they don’t have a landline and are not signed up for Reverse 911 and/or AlertSLO, they would not get an alert,” Jalbert said.
He says his office initially sent alerts through those two systems, but realized more was needed.
"Later on during the day, as we evaluated the situation, we started receiving multiple calls from people about not getting the information. We made a decision to go ahead and utilize our Wireless Emergency Alert System, which dramatically enhanced the notification in the area,” Jalbert said.
That alert sends a notification to your cell phone.
“It’s an automatic system that your phone gets and receives those types of alerts based on if you’re in the location that we issue those warnings for,” Jalbert said.
“As we were coming into town, our phones went off with an Amber-like alert and let us know that there was a problem with the water,” said Virgil Reimer of Bakersfield. “We travel around quite a bit, and you never know what you are getting into, so to have some sort of information, it just lets you make better decisions.”
Jalbert says it’s still possible some people were missed.
“Sometimes WEAS, they are not 100%. Nothing is 100%, and that’s why we use a multitude of systems when we’re sending out alerts,” Jalbert said.
He stresses the importance of being signed up for all types of emergency alerts.
For more information on how you can sign up for emergency alerts in San Luis Obispo County, click here. To sign up for emergency alerts in Santa Barbara County, click here.
