LA ship fire causes another gong show

[ZoWie]

There won't be any explosive vegetation fires around the holidays this year, thanks to three straight major rain storms.

We hear that Los Angeles emergency agencies learned a lot from the general fubar caused by January's fires, but a recent disaster in the LA harbor seems to suggest otherwise.

It started Friday night. One of those giant container ships, which are designed to a price rather than a safety spec, caught fire at a berth in Terminal Island near San Pedro. As of today, Tuesday morning, the ship is still burning. No matter how wretched your life might seem, at least you don't work on one of these ships. Another one took out a huge bridge in Baltimore last year. They are not safe, but that's not the problem here.

This is the problem:

Around dinner time on Friday, the smoke became toxic and a major emergency was declared. Authorities put most of San Pedro under a shelter in place order. The alert said to get everyone in that area off the street, close all doors and windows, plug all air leaks, turn off all ventilation, and don't go anywhere.

The alert did not go out to the public until the next morning. By then the ship had been towed offshore and out of the area, and there was no danger. I'm not altogether sure that the initial order went out at all. It may have been the cancellation that was sent to the public. There is still considerable confusion here, and you can't get a straight story.

Nobody was hurt... this time.

In the fire last January, we got an evacuation order at something like 3 AM. Every cell phone in LA County went crazy with a loud alarm followed by a Voice of Doom. It said that your Genasys alerting zone was under a full evacuation order, and to get out immediately. The actual zone involved was way out in the woods where maybe 5 or 6 people might live, but that didn't matter because everyone in the whole county got the alert. By morning the Nooz was saying that it was all a mistake. Fortunately no one took it seriously because it wasn't the first time. The phones had been going crazy for days with warnings for places where 99.99% of the people didn't live, but this was the first one in the dead of night.

Well, they fixed that problem. This time, when there actually was a real evacuation, nobody got it. At all. Well, can't say there were any false alarms. There were no alarms at all.

Eventually there will be mass casualties because of this flawed system. A valid alert either won't go out, or no one will believe it.

They need to fix this.