San Francisco emergency management officials sent out an alert Friday morning warning people in the Bay Area of an incoming tsunami and telling them to prepare for evacuation.
But the message, sent out to the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management’s nearly 80,000 Twitter followers and pushed to countless other phones and email accounts throughout the city, was an accident, officials said.
“There is no tsunami,” said Francis Zamora, a spokesman for the city’s department of emergency management. “There is no need for anyone to evacuate.”
Zamora said the alert was sent out in error during a routine system test.
“Unfortunately, that happened,” Zamora said. “We understand that it caused some concern and want to apologize for that. “
The alert, sent out at 8:46 a.m., seemed to do a better job of creating a wave of panic and confusion than it did to prepare people for a potential incoming wave of water.
Many people wary of the message logged onto the U.S. Geological Survey’s website to check for any potential earthquakes that could have caused such an event and were left confused when they found nothing.
Andrea Baker, 39, a resident of San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, saw the Twitter alert immediately.
“I freaked out and was looking online and I didn’t see any earthquakes,” Baker said. “What’s going on? I didn’t see any significant earthquakes. It was a stressful couple of minutes.”
Other San Franciscans woke up to immediate confusion, wondering what to make of the additional online message the emergency management officials that mentioned a 6.7 magnitude earthquake that apparently took place at “Tom's house” at approximately 3:45, on a date two days in the future.
“I didn’t even notice the earthquake description,” Baker said. “I was so freaked out that there could have been a tsunami.”
