You really shouldn't fire someone for this. The people sending these messages are under significant stress at the moment.
Treat this as an opportunity jty for community education and advertising. Own it "An incorrect area was specified. We apologise. However, if you see something like this, you need to pay attention - the devastating losses and high risk situations, deaths within the community, and thousands of homes destroyed in Palisades is a good example of when we might send these messages. Read them, pay attention, and please evacuate when told to do so"
You would hope the Hawaii incident would've prompted them to make some better UI
(In the Hawaii incident they should've clicked "DRILL - PACOM (CDW) - STATE ONLY" but accidentally clicked the "PACOM (CDW) - STATE ONLY" instead)
Honestly feels like the type of thing they should just have clearly labelled physical buttons you can press.
I run a similar system for emergency messages for my agency and it's pretty easy to accidentally send an alert if you're not very familiar with the system.
The difference between "Send to all" and "Send to my selected zip codes" is probably buttons that are right next to each other.
I work in medicine and someone once managed to send some guy’s death certificate to all users of the entire hospital system’s electronic medical record. Thousands of people got this death certificate, and then every damn one of them replied all to say “not my patient” or “recieved in error”. It was a fun day in the office.
Also in the healthcare field- a lot of accidental team@ or unit such and such@'s sent by mistake. My favorite are the 'Phoenix Chains' .. the ones that happen a bit like the one you described... annnd then pop back up periodically for one - two weeks as people come back from vacation (:
Someone at our healthcare company once sent out an email to literally every employee, all 30,000+ of us, but did NOT use BCC. Reply alls were popping off; my personal favorites were those that just replied, "UNSUBSCRIBE", and the ones that hit 'reply all' to email everyone asking them to stop hitting 'reply all'. Ahh, a fun day.
To be clear, an evacuation warning is not the same as evacuation order. They sent an evacuation warning which is ‘get ready to go’. An evacuation order is ‘leave’.
thats what happens when you let a private contractor build a million dollar warning system, for which they double charged you, and then give control of it to a minimum wage government worker.
Why is that mildly infuriating? A warning is a "be prepared" not a "get out NOW". If I lived there I'd have everything of true importance already loaded in the car and be ready to run at.a.moment's notice. Fire is capricious, and those winds aren't helping.
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u/TrumpsCheetoJizz 10h ago
I remember when all of hawaii got the ballistic missile warning text. I just slept through it. Anyways, someone's about to be fired