I was woken up a little before 4am by this alert:
Then I checked the Los Angeles emergency update site and found a map of the evacuation zones:
Burbank is way off to east of the only warning on the map. We’re much closer to the Eaton fire in Pasadena, but there’s no wind to speak of in our area at the moment and we’re separated from that fire by the Verdugo Mountains and Glendale. This map doesn’t show that fire because it’s an LA City map. Burbank isn’t even included because it’s a separate city much as Pasadena is a separate city. So the Eton fire evacuation zones aren’t shown on this map.
Yesterday afternoon we were in the Burbank Costco and the entire store got this evacuation warning:
I was reminded of the pager attack on Hezbollah since everyone was grabbing for their phones at the same time. Then we all went back to shopping because what else can you do? Maybe that was foolish but we all got an update a few minutes later:
To put the image in text form:
Emergency Alert
LACoOEM: Disregard last EVACUATION WARNING. It was for Kenneth Fire Only. AlertLA.org for more information.
Unsurprisingly, AlertLA.org includes lots of information about the actual evacuations, but I could not find any information about the false alarm. There’s a @NotifyLA Twitter account and the evacuation notice for the Kenneth fire has 36 replies which are mostly complaining that they got the alert, but aren’t in the effected area. One of the comments was from someone calling themselves hardware man who wrote:
you must mean Burbank blvd, not the city of Burbank…
And sure enough, if you zoom in on the southern border of the evacuation zone you’ll see Burbank Boulevard is the dividing line:
Burbank Blvd. starts in Burbank, unsurprisingly, and crosses the San Fernando Valley until it leaves the city of Los Angeles and becomes Spring Valley Road in Hidden Hills. So it’s possible the alert was sent to people who lived in Burbank instead of above this tiny stretch of Burbank Blvd.
Searching for LACoOEM (which stands for Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management), I found 8 posts on Reddit from yesterday afternoon about the false alarm. Remember I’m up now writing about this (at 5 in the morning) because of yet another false alarm.