Jun 16, 2009 5:37 pm US/Mountain
New Emergency Alert System Fails In Fort Collins
DENVER (CBS4/AP) ―
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David Queen sent in this photo of a tornado near Elbert, 10 miles south of Franktown.
David Queen/YouReports
Fort Collins officials are trying to figure out why a new emergency alert system failed to notify residents about a tornado warning.
An alert should have gone out to about 100,000 phone numbers and e-mail addresses on Monday but didn't.
"It stopped. There was something that stopped it from actually executing and making any phone calls," Kimberly Culp with the Larimer Emergency Telephone Authority said.
It may have been a good time for a breakdown. The National Weather Service said Tuesday that what was reported as a tornado 5 miles southwest of the city may have been just rotating clouds picked up by radar.
"Evidently when the communications center thought they were getting the message out, for some reason it did not," said Mike Gavin, Ft. Collins Emergency Manager. "The fortunate thing there is that there are other tools that we use to get that message out to folks."
County officials say the system was developed by Everbridge, the same company that successfully sent out alerts in the city of Aurora and in Morgan County around the same time.
Larimer County agencies paid $150,000 to start the system in September and then paid an annual fee of $95,000 to be able to send out an unlimited number of alerts.
The system has been used successfully 18 times in Larimer County. Monday's message would have been the first weather-related alert.
The Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Larimer County based on what was reported at the time as a sighting by a spotter. But Carl Burroughs of the National Weather Service said there's nothing else in the agency's records to back up that report, not even reports of funnel clouds.
Gavin says weather alerts on radio and television worked well. Other people got word from Colorado State University's alert system.
"It was like, 'Okay, what other system do we have that we can also try to reach some of the population that maybe isn't listening to radio or TV?' So that was another tool in the toolbox," Gavin said.
The warning came on another busy severe weather day in Colorado, leading Burroughs to believe that the tornado may have been wrongly attributed to a spotter rather than radar in the rush to process information.
He said radar can pick up cloud rotations though it can't actually see a tornado. He said conditions still warranted a warning.
Since Monday officials have been testing the system and said they have duplicated the error -- the first step to fixing the problem.
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