On the day Ontario awoke to a false emergency alert about a non-existent emergency at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, Pelmorex, the data analytics and media company that owns The Weather Network and Canada’s emergency national alert system, “exceeded” its role in maintaining the system’s technology by “consistently” advising on how and whether to issue alerts, a provincial investigation has found.

What happened: At 7:23 a.m. on Saturday, January 12, Ontario smartphones buzzed with a push alert about an “incident” at the plant. The alert advised there had been no release of radioactivity or need for “protective actions.” The pre-scripted message was sent by a new employee of the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre (PEOC) who thought they were on the training system, not the real one. The report shows how, over the course of 108 minutes, the employee, their colleagues and their supervisors struggled to rectify the mistake, not knowing how to send out a correction. At 9:11 a.m., a second alert let the public know there was “NO active nuclear situation,” and that the first message had been sent mistakenly.

Behind the scenes: More than an hour after the first message was sent, a Pelmorex employee who had made contact with PEOC in the immediate aftermath of the first alert advised a PEOC supervisor not to send a correction, citing concerns over “alert fatigue.” Given that Pelmorex had already broadcast a message through The Weather Network, the company employee said a province-wide notification could undermine public trust in the Alert Ready system. In a statement to The Logic, a Pelmorex spokesperson said the company was asked how to retract the false alert and provided its recommendation. “However, it is at the sole discretion of the authorized government issuer to determine if and when to issue a broadcast intrusive ‘End of Alert’ message,” the spokesperson said.

Why it matters: Unlike the U.S., where the Federal Emergency Management Agency is responsible for national alerts, Pelmorex, which owns the Canadian equivalent, is a private company. Canada’s alert system is run through a public-private partnership between the telecom industry and governments; Ontario has a user agreement with Pelmorex as an alert issuer. PEOC employees can access it from different devices with Pelmorex-managed credentials.

How we got here: In an interview with The Logic on Wednesday before the release of the report, Pelmorex CEO Sam Sebastian said the emergency system was “a hot potato” between the federal and provincial governments, so the company stepped in.“We manage and ensure the technical backbone works correctly and is distributed on all platforms,” Sebastian said. 

Design flaws: A similar investigation into a 2018 false-alert text in Hawaii—“Emergency Alert: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”—concluded that alert-system vendors should include “critical functions such as previewing and cancelling alerts as well as provisions for training.” Ontario noted similar design issues, saying the live and training systems look similar, and that workers lacked sufficient training. Since that day, the report says, the system has been modified to clearly mark test messages, to add pre-scripted “end alert” messages and to ensure two employees now oversee any future tests. As Homer Simpson would say, “You just have to read the manual and press the right button.”   

Should we panic? This isn’t the first time the emergency alert system has glitched. And the report says little about the merits of a public-private partnership handling possible “the-world-is-ending-save-yourself” communications. “I unreservedly apologize for the alarm and anxiety caused to people across the province and I want to assure the public that everything possible is being done to prevent a similar event in the future,” said Ontario solicitor general Sylvia Jones in a statement. For its part, Pelmorex said it is reviewing the findings from the report, and “will work with all federal, provincial and territorial Alert Ready partners to evaluate potential solutions to ensure that the Alert Ready system continues to be used, as intended, to notify the public of life-threatening situations.”