Fire Alert Sent to Millions of Cellphones Was California’s Largest Warning Yet Image With fires raging out of control and extremely high winds forecast, California officials on Wednesday night sent out an alert to seven counties and at least eight million cellphones. Listen to authorities.”The alert went to most smartphones across seven counties that are home to more than 22 million people — by far California’s largest use of a disaster warning system created by Congress and activated in 2012. The same alert system was not used in October, when fires swept through Napa and Sonoma Counties near San Francisco, destroying thousands of homes and killing dozens of people. The kind of warning that California officials sent on Wednesday, called a wireless emergency alert, is like a text message but uses a different system. Usually, the emergency alerts are sent by counties or cities, and Ventura County used the system this week before the state did.

Source: New York Times December 07, 2017 22:10 UTC