Emergency Management and other agencies across Iowa were scrambling Saturday afternoon, to assure residents in their respective counties that they were not under a “Blizzard Warning.” At around 3:30-p.m., persons with Emergency Notification System alerts on their phones likely received the warning, which indicated the message was a “Test.” Moments later, another message was sent asking recipients of the first message, to “Disregard.”

Pottawattamie County Emergency Management Coordinator Doug Reed said in a statement, “The Pottawattamie Alert program, part of the Alert Iowa System, was inadvertently activated for multiple severe weather events by the company who provides the service across Iowa. Pottawattamie County Emergency Management notified the company upon receipt of the messages and the president of Inspiron Logistics, operators of the Wireless Emergency Notification System (WENS) which serves as the platform for the alerting system, confirmed that live messages were inadvertently sent while they were attempting to troubleshoot other internal programming issues.”

In a statement released Saturday evening, Inspiron Logistics, LLC., said “During a software update release Saturday afternoon, testing was being conducted which simulates Warnings and Watches issued from the National Weather Service. This system accidentally triggered a Blizzard/Fire Warning. Unfortunately these alerts did hit the system as if they were authentic, due to code that was not deactivated to prevent the final activation process.”

The company said also, “The entire Software Update has been backed out and will be further examined to determine what cause [sic] this issue. Internal procedures will be implemented to prevent this scenario from happening in the future.”

Doug Reed emphasized that “Officials from Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management, as well as County Emergency Management Agencies across the state, are working to [also] ensure these type of false system activations are prevented in the future.”