Mono County officials reported that a Sept. 25 Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA/IPAWS) test failed to reach large numbers of residents on voice and text channels, prompting an investigation with state and vendor partners and plans for a retest.

Emergency management staff told the Board of Supervisors that the county’s test sent email, voice and text alerts through a vendor, Genesys, but that many messages did not complete. “I’m gonna say this was a big failure,” said the county’s emergency manager, who presented the results and described efforts to work with Genesys and Cal OES to identify causes.

The county’s summary of the test showed mixed delivery: about 1,410 voice messages were received while 6,935 failed; of text messages, 728 were received and 7,553 failed. The presenter said 78 people texted back acknowledged receipts. County staff and the vendor have elevated the issue to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) to determine whether other counties experienced similar failures and to troubleshoot vendor-side routing.

Staff discussed several possible causes with the board: cell service interruption in parts of the county, issues created during the vendor transition from an older alerting platform (Code Red) to Genesys, phone carriers’ differing behaviors when using polygon-based targeting, and maintenance gaps at cell-tower sites that can affect emergency alerting equipment attached to towers.

The emergency manager listed alternative alerting channels that residents should consider while investigators debug the system: NOAA weather radio (which relies on a radio broadcast independent of local cell networks), the FEMA app, the county’s Genesis app, and PBS WARN. He also said law enforcement and boots-on-the-ground evacuation remain the primary fall-back when alerts do not reach residents.

Supervisor questions focused on who is counted as reached when recipients did not push a confirmation key, the timing of a retest and whether monthly tests would risk “alert fatigue.” The emergency manager said recipients who received the message but did not reply are counted as reached; he recommended a retest in about a month, and said monthly testing is reasonable to validate fixes and maintain public awareness.

Staff said they have opened lines of inquiry with AT&T and Verizon about tower equipment and with Cal OES about whether other counties saw similar failures. A retest was tentatively scheduled for the week of Oct. 23–24.

No formal board action was required; county staff said they will continue to work with vendors and state partners and return with a status update after the next test.