PORTLAND – An emergency alert system test showed promising signs Thursday, weeks after the City of Portland system failed its initial try.
The Portland Bureau Of Emergency Management test contacts people by landline, email and text message. The test went out to around 315,000 people and concluded at 6 p.m.
Starting at 11 a.m. Thursday, the alerts started coming to people in the City Hall conference room. It was expected to take at least three hours to reach everyone. The system can only pump out 2,000 alerts a minute.
“Knowing that it’s doing a good job of launching these sectors today gives me confidence the system really is working,” BOEM director Carmen Merlo said. “The vendors have made the necessary fixes to the system and that we have a product we can rely on in an emergency event.”
Last month’s test only reached one percent of its intended recipients.
BOEM officials said something as simple as a phone number not being well-formatted could have created a hiccup that prevented the rest of the numbers from being loaded into the system last time.
KGW Reporter Tim Gordon contributed to this report
