SAN FRANCISCO – After a few tense moments, city officials in San Francisco were left with red faces Friday morning after an alert was erroneously tweeted out warning residents of an incoming tsunami, and telling them to prepare for an evacuation.
The message, sent by the city’s Department of Emergency Management (DEM) to nearly 80,000 Twitter followers, was sent by accident, however.
“There is no tsunami,” Francis Zamora, spokesman for the city department told the San Francisco Chronicle. “There is no need for anyone to evacuate.”
The alert was sent at 8:46 a.m. Pacific Time, Friday, causing a wave of confusion and panic among local residents.
Many locals immediately logged onto the US Geological Survey, which would have updated information about any potential earthquakes which would have caused a tsunami, or the National Weather Service, which would have updated information about any tsunami alerts for the Pacific Basin. Neither site indicated any sort of alert taking place.
Within minutes, the DEM sent out a second tweet indicating the first message was in error.
A later message said the department was reviewing the error in order to make recommendations on how to prevent this type of incident from occurring again.
