NEMA to investigate glitches with emergency alert system

The National Emergency Management Agency says it will look into reports of apparent inconsistencies in how people received the latest emergency alerts.

One man reporting nearly 50 of the alarms ringing out on his phone, while others said they did not receive an alert about the tsunami risk from the magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia.

NEMA spokesperson John Price said the agency sent out two alerts, the first one went out on Wednesday afternoon at about 4.15pm and a second one was sent out at 6.30am on Thursday morning.

Price said they would be looking into why some people received 30 to 50 alerts to understand why that had occurred.

"It could be different providers and different cell towers, there's a lot of possibilities."

He said there was always room for improvement but NEMA was doing the best with what it currently had.

"We will be working with the platform providers, with these telecommunication providers as well, to get to the bottom of why this may have occurred.

"So yes we are taking this seriously and we will look into it to make sure that we can provide the best service for New Zealanders."

Marlborough resident Terry Costello said he got the first alert on Wednesday afternoon. Then another ... and another.

"By the time I went to bed at 10pm, they were still going on and there'd be 32 of them by then. And I turned my phone off at 10pm and went to bed. And I turned it on again at 7am this morning and since then I've had another 16. So that's 48 altogether I've had."

Costello said it just kept going, he would get an alert and then another one a minute or two later.

"And yeah, it was a little bit. Sometimes they give you a bit of a fright."

Bodhi Twilley, who lives in west Auckland's Titirangi, said the alerts started when he was driving home with his son.

"I kind of lost count, but it just keep happening."

He got at least two alerts in the car and then another few once he got home - but also that was on two devices which added to the number of alerts.

"So we're just constantly going off."

Twilley said he received another two or three alerts when he got up on Thursday morning and then a couple more after he had left home.

"The messages were so frequent that we just stopped reading them, basically because they were coming to all our devices and to everyone in the house, so they were just constantly going off."

Others received no alert

Christchurch woman Donna Glass has received alerts before but unlike Costello and Twilley, she did not receive a single one this time.

She does not understand why some were getting them and others not - even when they were all in the same space.

"There were the seven of us at our book club last night in Christchurch and we, out of the seven of us, only one person had received a text, an alert text."

Rosemarie Quax, who lives in Hamilton, said there were three cell phones in her household and none of them received an alert.

She only learned about the tsunami warning through media reports.

"I was listening to RNZ this morning and they were talking about some people getting numerous alerts and in the week they were getting woken up and I just said to my husband 'well we didn't receive anything'."

Price said the message was only directed to those people who were in areas that were deemed at risk and anyone who later entered an at risk area would receive the message at that point.

Anyone in central New Zealand for example would not have received an emergency mobile alert because there was no need for them to get it, he said.

People with their phones in flight mode or whose phones were turned off would not receive the alert, he said.

Asked why if there were seven people in the same room only one got an emergency message on their phone, Price said the agency was looking into that.

"I think the important thing is the message was received by some people there and therefore they have hopefully acted on the message."

The system is tested annually across all of New Zealand and was last tested in May this year, he said.

The tests have shown that the alerts cover about 90 percent of the country because there are some areas which do not have cell phone coverage, he said.

Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell told RNZ there appeared to have been a glitch and the National Emergency Management Agency was working with telecommunications providers to resolve it.

"What I've been told is it can be people standing, changing over different cell towers and it's triggering another alert. So those are glitches that we need to work on.

"I mean, the good thing is that, like I said, the system hasn't been used for a long time nationally. So it's good that that these issues have been highlighted so that we can get to work and fix them.

However, Mitchell said he was pleased with the authority's response to the tsunami warnings.

"We've been proactive and we're making sure that people get the information they need that they can make the decisions that they have to make. There's nothing alarmist about it. It's quite something the best information that we have at the time."

Mitchell also urged people to heed the officials' warnings in an emergency like this to avoid putting themselves and others in danger.

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