Green Bay residents encounter confusion after 'emergency alert' was sent out cellphones across city

GREEN BAY - The emergency message that some Green Bay residents received about 5:20 p.m. Tuesday via cellular phone was problematic ­— both for receivers and senders.

The original message, encouraging an evacuation of people because of a “police call near Edgewood/Hillside,” was designed to inform people in 18 houses in the immediate vicinity of the 500 block of Edgewood Drive near the intersection with Hillside Lane on the city's east side. The message did not mention Green Bay, or the nature of the emergency because of a 90-charater limit on such messages, said Lauri Maki, Brown County Emergency Management director.

Instead, the alert instead went to everyone in Brown County who subscribes to IPAWS alerts – an emergency warning system provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and overseen by Wisconsin Emergency Communications, Maki said. The message might have also reached cellphones in Oconto and Outagamie counties.

At 5:42 p.m. Tuesday, the Green Bay Police Department sent out an email alert using the Nixle service that identified the block on Edgewood Drive and the emergency — a gas leak.

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Maki said IPAWS, which sent out the initial alert, “is an amazing tool when it works … Last night wasn’t a mistake, it was how the system works. Learning from lessons like this are how we can make the system better.” He vowed to shared what he had learned with WEC.

IPAWS messages are designed to automatically be received by phones in the designated area. Other services in use in the county, including Nixle and CodeRED, require users to “opt in” before they can receive messages.

Maki said he sent a cancellation message about 10 minutes after the original message; he said the county’s Communications Center, which handles calls to 911, received roughly 30 calls asking about the emergency. Because the center is supposed to be strictly for emergency calls, the cancellation was issued.

Later, Brown County Emergency Management posted an explanation on Facebook.

The original message, Maki and Green Bay police said later, was to alert people in the immediate area to evacuate their homes, taking family members and pets, because one home on the block contained a high level of natural gas. The gas presented a danger to anyone in the home who breathed it, Maki said, and presented an explosion hazard to people in and around nearby homes.

For these reasons, Maki chose to notify people using IPAWS.

The gas leak was “a clear hazard,” he said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “We have CodeRED alerts if we have a missing kid like we often do in the summer, or possible flooding like we had last spring. To me, this was a no-brainer that it was an IPAWS.”

The good news: No one was hurt, including the 63-year-old man police said was in the house, and who authorities rescued. He was not supposed to be there because the house had been condemned.

An 8:13 p.m. message via Nixle announced to “CANCEL” the evacuation order; the follow-up message also announced “scene clear.”

Contact Doug Schneider at dschneid@gannett.com, (920) 265-2070 or on Twitter @PGDougSchneider.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay residents encounter confusion after alert was sent