At 1:55 p.m. on Friday, a man riding his motorcycle in Windham was shot multiple times. The suspected gunman fled. Police quickly established a perimeter around neighboring towns while they searched for him.
Windham police Chief Kevin Schofield said his department requested a local emergency alert at 2:20 p.m., which was sent to nearby residents in Cumberland County at 2:58.
Roughly two hours later, at about 4:17 p.m., an emergency alert warning of a “gunman at large” was blasted to every phone in Maine. State police would later say that alert was sent by mistake.
It is not clear who requested the alert or why it was sent statewide. Maine State Police Maj. Lucas Hare said at a news conference on Friday that there was “an error with the way (the alert) was entered into the system. It was not intentional,” but did not specify further.
Spokespeople for the Maine Emergency Management Agency and the Maine State Police would not answer specific questions this week about the chain of events behind Friday’s alert, including who requested the notification and who ultimately hit “send,” why it was sent more than two hours after the shooting and whether an internal review has begun into what went wrong.
Schofield said in a phone interview Monday that his agency made the initial emergency alert request about 20 minutes after the shooting through CodeRED, an emergency alert system Cumberland County residents can opt-in to. Schofield said he couldn’t speak to why the alert was sent statewide.
“Our county emergency management people receive the message from us, go over it, and get the ‘OK’ from people on scene,” Schofield said. “And I believe there’s a protocol that they have to go through for the state to actually get it sent out. But they can answer to that question.”
Vanessa Sperrey, a spokesperson for MEMA, wrote in an email Monday that the alert was sent to phones across Maine because of a “geo-fencing” issue, referring to the GPS technology used to trigger a software response, like an emergency alert, within a specific geographic area.
“The intention was for the public alert to target the Windham area. It went statewide instead,” Sperrey said. “Our staff contacted the software company to report the geo-fencing error. After that, the other subsequent public alerts for the Windham incident were executed flawlessly.”
While local alerts like CodeRED can be issued by local authorities, statewide alerts are typically only issued by federal, state and local agencies that participate in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s integrated alert system. The National Weather Service, for example, can issue warnings for floods or snow squalls and the Maine Department of Public Safety can send out AMBER Alerts for abducted children, Sperrey said.
“Public alerting is triggered by an instigating event,” she wrote. “MEMA issues alerts for civil emergencies, evacuations, or shelter-in-place situations such as fires, hazardous materials incidents, avalanches, earthquakes, or 911 outages.”
But not every emergency alert is initiated by the state or the federal government. Sperrey wrote that certain “authorized counties and tribes” can issue alerts for civil emergencies, evacuations or shelter-in-place orders through a federal warning system.
She did not respond to a follow-up question asking which counties are authorized. But a FEMA list of agencies that have opted into its alert system shows Androscoggin, Aroostook, Kennebec, Lincoln, Somerset, Waldo and York counties, as well as MEMA. Cumberland County, which includes Windham, is not on that list.
Similar incidents have unfolded here and across the country in recent years, calling into question the safety and efficacy of the country’s emergency alert systems.
Last year, an erroneous alert was issued across Maine that the state’s 911 systems were down — a false alarm issued after Massachusetts’ 911 system went down for about two hours.
In Delaware, an emergency alert about a chemical accident in January was mistakenly sent statewide hours after officials said the incident unfolded. That incident was caused by “an inadvertent error in selecting the method for dissemination,” according to the state’s emergency management director.
As wildfires swept across California that same month, some emergency alerts in affected areas took hours to send while others were blasted to metro areas far removed from the flames. The issues were attributed to both aging infrastructure and user error.
Similarly in Texas, sporadic emergency alerts during the deadly flash floods in July were sent out more than 90 minutes after police’s initial request. That delay was blamed on a sluggish chain of command.
Staff Writer Daniel Kool contributed to this report.
