When asked about the city’s emergency alert system test, Public Safety Manager Susan Dueñas was succinct: “It went.”
City of Malibu held its first full-scale test of Everbridge, a disaster mass notification system, on Wednesday, Feb. 7, at 7 p.m.
Many residents were unsatisfied with the results, but Dueñas said the test wasn’t designed to be “a pass or fail kind of thing.”
“We needed to test to see if it was going to work,” she said in an interview with The Malibu Times.
The notification system is in place for a more localized approach to informing residents in events such as the Civic Center fire earlier this month, “where you maybe only have a couple hundred contacts.”
This is the first time the system has been used in Malibu. On seeing other neighboring communities deal with notification problems in light of fire and flooding disasters, City Manager Reva Feldman and Dueñas decided testing the system was necessary.
“We thought, ‘My gosh, we can’t wait till we have a fire to try and use this system,’” Dueñas said. “So that’s why, you know, we were anxious to do it as soon as possible.”
Three weeks were allotted to spread the word of the test and to get people to register; cell phone registrations doubled from 1,600 people to well over 3,000 people.
“It wasn’t really a test of Malibu,” she added. “It was a test of Everbridge.”
According to her, once the company got wind of the test, it initiated constant contact with the city in ensuring that the test went smoothly.
The program has groups of phone numbers, including Verizon landlines, residential lines, business lines and self-registered numbers.
“Again, with all these landlines, we have no idea how many people actually have a phone,” she said. Partly, this exercise was a “fact-finding test,” to see how many landlines were actually attached to phones.
Dueñas addressed complaints from the community.
“I think a lot of people expected all their phones to ring at 7 o’clock,” she said. “And I guess I can put that on us. We didn’t get the message out strongly enough that no, not all phones [would ring at the same time].”
The test—which was scheduled to go for hours—was stopped at 9:30 p.m. so residents wouldn’t receive an unwelcome test alert during the night.
One of the biggest complaints was receiving an email rather than a text message or phone call, something Dueñas said was out of the city’s control.
“They had a glitch in their system, completely unrelated to our test,” she said. “Hardly any texts went out.”
Prior to the test, the notification system was programmed to send notifications to the Everbridge app first, text second and email third—something Dueñas looks to change.
“We need phones to ring,” she said, adding that, ideally, the order would be: the Everbridge app, text message, cell phone, landline, secondary cell phone and secondary landline.
With about 500 people calling and emailing with questions and concerns, Dueñas said she and a volunteer are “wading through it slowly.”
She is now encouraging people to email her for a test group she is putting together, which looks to have 400-500 people. She plans to use different facets of the alert system and collect data through the group.
The community can expect another Malibu-wide test—most likely split into west, central and east—in a few months.
“To me, this is [a] success because now we know what we have and we can tweak it,” she said.
Moreover, Dueñas emphasized that the test was not meant to be “front line evacuation.”
“Best case scenario, you’re talking 30 minutes [to send notifications]. That’s why people need to understand: Don’t depend on government to be your first alert on this,” she said. “It’s going to be deputies, your neighbors.”