City calls Portland emergency notification test a 'failure'

PORTLAND, Ore. - Most local residents hoping to get a phone call or text message Thursday morning during a city-wide test of an emergency notification system got nothing, a spokesman for the department conducting the test said Thursday afternoon.

Randy Neves, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM), said that while the test was still technically ongoing Thursday afternoon, he was calling the results so far "a failure."

Neves said only 2,100 of the 317,000 people who signed up for a phone call or text message from the system actually got a notification and apparently no one outside the city limits received a message.

The system is designed to send out information during a natural disaster or other large-scale emergency. It should send information to people with a home phone or who are signed up to receive a call or text message on their mobile phone.

PBEM director Carmen Merlo said if the notification system's vendor, FirstCall, could not quickly resolve the problem, the city would have to "reevaluate our service contract with them."

"With any new software, load testing under live conditions is necessary to reveal issues that internal or small scale testing will miss and the problems encountered today are currently being addressed," said FirstCall president Matthew Teague.

Large-scale public notification systems, sometimes called "reverse 9-1-1" systems, are becoming more common following incidents like the Sept. 11 attacks, campus shootings and natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes and oil spills.

The proliferation of cell phones with texting abilities is the latest avenue for notification systems to alert thousands of people to dangerous conditions in a short timeframe.