False Alarm Led to Panic in Dam Area

Elena Abreu was serving dinner at the Marie Callender’s restaurant in east Ventura when a woman came into the restaurant’s bar area about 6 p.m. Saturday and started talking about how Casitas Dam might have cracked.

In an instant, the young mother thought about her husband and four young children inside their Ramona Street house in west Ventura--four miles away and directly in the path of the dam.

“I panicked,” said Abreu, sitting at home with her family Sunday before the Super Bowl.

Instead of racing out the door in her work apron, Abreu asked her manager to call her husband at home. Carlos Abreu relayed this: A false alarm had occurred during testing of an emergency siren system that warns people of a dam break.

Despite that reassurance, all was not calm in Abreu’s neighborhood, said Carlos Abreu, who had been working on his home computer when the testing started.

“There were families in cars and on foot trying to leave. The street was jammed, and I tried to tell a few people it was just a test, but they didn’t believe me,” he said.

According to officials, it was supposed to be a routine 30-second test of the dam’s emergency siren system, the eighth such test since the system was installed last year as part of an earthquake retrofitting project on the dam that is scheduled for completion this fall.

Residents were forewarned of the test last week in news stories and in fliers distributed in Ventura and Lake Casitas. And when the siren started at 6 p.m. Saturday, repeated announcements were made over speakers dotting neighborhoods along the Ventura River.

The beginning of the test went fine, but when operators tried to silence the alarm, the computer system refused to accept a cancel command, officials said. Real warnings alerting people to immediately seek higher ground, then began blaring over the speakers for an additional 10 minutes until the computer program finally ended.

Officials are blaming a computer malfunction, but on Sunday they still did not know the exact cause.

According to Ventura Assistant Fire Chief Michael Lavery, Saturday’s scheduled test was run on a special computer system inside the emergency communications center at the Ventura police and fire headquarters on Ralston Street in east Ventura.

This site is one of three testing locations for the warning system installed last year by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The others are at the Government Center in Ventura and Casitas Dam.

This was the first siren test conducted at the Ventura police and fire headquarters.

At least two tests staged last year at the other locations revealed that the flood early warning system was not fully functional, officials said then.

During this weekend’s test, a city communications manager and a Spanish-speaking interpreter were staffing the site. According to Lavery, the interpreter announced several times in English and Spanish that testing was beginning and then the siren was activated with the push of a button.

Lavery, who was inspecting a new speaker in the eight-mile-long system installed at Surfer’s Point, said that the siren should have stopped after half a minute but that it kept sounding and then the real warnings began.

“I was on a cell phone telling them to get this thing off,” Lavery said. “[The communications manager] was pushing cancel, and it wasn’t working.”

Lavery said he then instructed city employees to call county authorities, who have access to the same siren system at another site at the Government Center, but they couldn’t be reached because of a flood of 911 calls that poured in during the test.

Officials at county and city law enforcement agencies said they received more than 500 calls from panicked residents.

“It was incredibly unfortunate that this wound up happening,” Lavery said. “But one of the things people forgot about is that the dam is not going to collapse on its own. There has to be a quake bigger than 7.0.”