Emergency alert meant for small area in Eugene ‘inadvertently’ sent out countywide

An emergency alert sent to cellphones early Friday, Aug. 28, about SWAT activity in a west Eugene neighborhood was “inadvertently sent out countywide,” Eugene police said in a statement later Friday.

“Last night’s alert was intended for Lane County subscribers and for Wireless Emergency Alerts in the small, affected neighborhood,” police said. “However, it was inadvertently sent out countywide, causing many residents outside the intended area to receive the notification.”

Central Lane 911, the emergency dispatch center for Eugene police and several other agencies, sent out the alert. The communications center is considered a division of Eugene Police Department.

Residents in several cities in Lane County groused on social media about being awakened by the alert, distributed to cellphones shortly after 1:30 a.m. and asking residents near the Elmira Road and Archie Street intersection in west Eugene’s Bethel-Danebo neighborhood to shelter in place or evacuate the area.

City officials in Florence, about 60 miles west of Eugene, early Friday posted on the city’s Facebook page to tell residents the alert was not for the coastal community, and Lookout Eugene-Springfield has received a report of multiple people in Bend receiving the alert. 

Emily Jessie, acting operations manager for the dispatch communications center, in a video statement said the center “can use wireless alerting that’s based on the cellphone towers in the selected area.” 

The 911 communication center can also choose to send alerts to “whoever has subscribed to Lane County alerts to receive emergency notifications,” Jessie said.

Lane Alerts is a sign-up service providing emergency notifications to residents about “severe weather, wildfire, evacuations or other emergency situations,” according to the service’s sign-up page. 

“When we’re doing public alerting of this nature, these are dynamic incidents where the alert needs to be created quickly and sent out quickly,” Jessie said. “And there are several steps that have to be followed in the system in order to get the exact type of alert to go to the exact type of area, so there is room for human error.”

Jessie also said that the nature of the wireless alerts in particular mean that “it’s not going to be an exact science of where it goes to, who receives it,” as the alerts rely on GPS coordinates and cellphone towers.

“A good example of that is there’s a time frame that’s selected,” Jessie said. If a time frame of two hours is selected, “based on the wireless alerting, anyone who comes within range of that selected cellphone tower and their phone routes off of it any time in that two hours might receive that alert that may or may not apply to where they are at the time,” Jessie said. 

The alert early Friday asked people in the area of Elmira Road and Archie Street to “evacuate the area or shelter in place.” 

Police said later that a 31-year-old man had refused commands from SWAT officers to come out of a home. The man was believed to have possibly been in possession of high-powered rifles, police said.

Officers took the man into custody at 1:44 a.m., and he was booked into Lane County Jail on suspicion of coercion, menacing and unlawful possession of body armor, among other charges.

The statement Friday by Eugene police also explained more about various types of emergency alerts.

“The alerting system is a countywide system that allows the sender to choose both the type of alert and the geographic area it should reach. Different technologies deliver messages in different ways. Reverse 911 reaches landlines, Emergency Alerting reaches TV and radio, and Wireless Emergency Alerts reach cell phones connected to selected towers,” police said in the statement.

The statement from Eugene police said the wireless emergency alerts rely on GPS and cell-tower routing, which means “even correctly sent alerts may reach unintended devices on occasion.”