SILVERTONAPPEAL.COM ܂ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6, 2018 ܂ 3A
What went wrong with water alerts?
Jonathan Bach Salem Statesman Journal
USA TODAY NETWORK
The head of Oregon's Office of Emer-
gency Management is apologizing after
his agency sent a vague wireless emer-
gency alert without "specific informa-
tion we had meant to send" about Sa-
lem's contaminated drinking water ad-
visory.
"This was a failure on our part," An-
drew Phelps, director of the emergency
agency, said in a video posted to social
media.
Phelps said the integrated public
alert and warning system "inadvertent-
ly defaulted to a generic message." He
said agency officials rushed to give up-
dates on social media and manually
override the generic message, pushing
another alert with information on the
water advisory.
Salem city officials on May 29 re-
leased a do-not-drink advisory after low
levels of toxins were discovered in city
drinking water from the North Santiam
River.
The advisory is for children younger
than 6 years old and vulnerable popula-
tions, including dialysis patients and
those with compromised immune sys-
tems. Officials say there is no danger for
healthy adults drinking the water,
which is also used in other towns,
including Stayton and Turner.
The advisory set off a run on bottled
water a local grocery stores.
In an interview May 30 with the
Statesman Journal, Phelps said May 29
marked the first time ever the state had
used its wireless emergency alert sys-
tem.
"As soon as we saw it on our own
phones, yeah, we knew pretty quickly
that it did not work the way we had ex-
pected it to work," he said.
Phelps said a senior IT staff member
trained on the emergency alert system
typed in the message with approval
from an executive duty officer, he said.
For the alert, the city of Salem had
adapted language from the Oregon
Health Authority.
Marion County did not send the alert
because it doesn't have that ability, so
the Marion Area Multi-Agency Emer-
gency Telecommunications Dispatch
Center in Woodburn was asked to send
it, said Jolene Kelley, spokeswoman for
Marion County.
However, a technical issue stopped
the dispatch center from being able to
send it, so the Office of Emergency Man-
agement was contacted as a backup,
Kelley said.
Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management Director Andrew Phelps apologizes in a video posted on the agency’s
Facebook page. PHOTO COURTESY OF OEM
"Generally these messages ... get sent
out at the local level or if it's a weather
issue, they get sent out by the National
Weather Service," Phelps said. "So, this
was the first time we've ever initiated a
wireless emergency alert. Usually it's
something that the locals handle."
Phelps said no testing options exist
for the wireless alerts, though the televi-
sion and radio alert system is tested
weekly. He said officials are trained on
the emergency alert system via Federal
Emergency Management Agency train-
ings posted online.
Phelps said the wireless alert went to
phones within the area served by the af-
fected water system, while another alert
went to television and radio broadcast-
ers that serve the affected area.
"We are conducting a forensic analy-
sis of the steps we took to send this mes-
sage and to ensure our procedures are
written and practiced in a way that will
prevent confusing messages from being
sent ... in the future," Phelps said.
The Office of Emergency Manage-
ment said in an earlier statement May
29: "This was a technology issue which
OEM is currently working to learn how
and why it happened."
Policy expert Jim Moore pointed to
similarities between Oregon's blunder
and an incident earlier this year when
an emergency alert in Hawaii warned of
a ballistic missile strike that sparked
massive panic.
"Just like Hawaii and the missile
alert, there is work to do," said Moore,
director of the Tom McCall Center for
Policy Innovation at Pacific University.
"Whether this was software, human
error, or confused communications, the
first message just created a mild form of
panic. It is the job of OEM’s communica-
tions to actually communicate to the
public, not confuse it," Moore said.
Still, Moore said, clearer communi-
cations in the past have spurred other
problems, such as an incident in the
1980s where a tsunami warning for
areas along the coast drew spectators
from the Willamette Valley wanting to
see the event.
"This points out the problem," Moore
“As soon as we saw it on our
own phones, yeah, we knew
pretty quickly that it did not
work the way we had
expected it to work.”
Andrew Phelps,
director of Oregon's
Office of Emergency Management,
regarding the wireless emergency alert system
said.
"It is not just the quality of communi-
cation from OEM, it is the listeners’ abil-
ities to act appropriately on that infor-
mation that will determine how people
deal with the 'big one,' out there some-
where off the coast."
Email jbach@statesmanjournal.com,
call (503) 399-6714 or follow on Twitter
@jonathanmbach.
PORTLAND
Water
Continued from Page 1A
Toxin levels fell both naturally and
because of city efforts, city spokesman
Kenny Larson said.
Workers adjusted chlorine and pH
levels, flushed the lines, and diluted the
toxins by mixing the contaminated wa-
ter with clean water from the city’s un-
derground storage aquifer and from the
city of Keizer.
City officials said they recognize that
public confidence in the water system
has been shaken.
“It’s a relief that the advisory’s being
lifted,” Steve McCoid, Salem City Coun-
cil president said.
“We’re going to have to, as a council
and a staff, go back and reexamine this
process, our procedures, our protocols,”
he said.
“Long term we’re going to have to
start considering, if this is the new nor-
mal, what are we going to do to change
the way we handle the water,” McCoid
said. “Lessons learned, I guess.”
City manager Steve Powers also ac-
knowledged during an emergency city
council meeting Friday that public con-
fidence in the quality and safety of the
drinking water has been diminished.
“That is causing me the most pain
and disappointment,” Powers said.
The Oregon Health Authority recom-
mends families with children under six
and other vulnerable populations take
measures to reduce the chance that tox-
ins are present in residential water sys-
tems.
They include throwing out ice and
sanitizing bin areas, flushing both cold
and hot water faucets and cleaning ap-
pliances such as water dispensers and
ice makers.
Salem city councilor Chris Hoy an-
nounced that the water was safe on his
Facebook page about two hours before
the City announced it via press release
and Facebook.
It took the city longer to make the an-
nouncement because officials needed to
get everything ready to put on the web-
site, in two languages, city spokeswom-
an Heather Dimke said.
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