Answers Sought in Casitas Dam False Alarm

VENTURA —  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.

Mona Gutierrez and her children, ages 11 and 8, were at a church on Warner Street off Ventura Avenue when they heard the siren sound and then recorded warnings telling residents to flee.

“The kids were scared,” Gutierrez said. “My son told me we had to hurry and get to his grandma’s house because there was going to be a flood.”

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Gutierrez’s friend, Dennis Hammack, who walked with the Gutierrez family back to their home on Ramona Street, said traffic was backed up for several blocks on Ventura Avenue and on several smaller side streets.

“Everybody was freaking out. There were people outside their homes and jumping in their cars, and people who don’t have cars were walking,” Hammack said. “There were a few people even running and crying.”

And up in Casitas Springs near the dam, Christina Hodge had just settled in to watch the 6 p.m. television news when her son came inside and said a flood warning had sounded.

“I didn’t hear a thing, but after he came in, my husband said we’d better get our shoes on and start packing,” she said.

Instead of leaving their home of three decades, the Hodge family stayed put, believing it was most likely a false alarm because there were no further announcements on television or radio.

“If it was the real thing, we figured we would have heard more,” Christina Hodge said.

The Hodges are veterans of dam trouble, having endured an incident in 1969 when 20,000 cubic feet of water per second cascaded over Matilija Dam and washed away a trailer park just up the street.

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 at 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, which wasn’t expected.

“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.”

Indeed, Lavery and other city personnel had held nearly two dozen meetings with residents last year and explained that the 40-year-old dam was undergoing a $42-million strengthening project, which included the siren system designed to warn residents in the event of a major quake.

Despite the diagnosis of nothing worse than a computer malfunction, county and city leaders said they are still concerned.

Supervisor John Flynn said Sunday that he plans to ask county staff on Tuesday to conduct an inquiry into all emergency operating systems currently in place, including the Casitas Dam siren system and a separate flood warning system in La Conchita.

Flynn said he wants to be briefed on where the systems are located, what agencies are responsible and how often they are tested. He also wants confirmation that all warning systems are functioning properly.

“That’s a frightening thing to have that alarm go off like it did,” Flynn said. “I know there can be mistakes and no one did anything intentional, but something like this puts a lot of fear in people.”

Ventura City Councilman Jim Friedman, one of several city officials who met with Bureau of Reclamation officials last year to express concern about what he considered the agency’s slow pace in the installation of the sirens, said Sunday he will meet with other city officials today to discuss what should be done next.

“Neither computers nor humans are perfect,” he said. “We would hope things would go perfectly but occasionally they don’t.”

According to Jeff McCracken, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the glitch occurred either in a microchip containing the testing information or in the system that runs the program.

“What it wouldn’t do is shut off and we need to know why,” McCracken said Sunday afternoon.

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In addition to fixing the problem, McCracken said, the bureau needs to research how it can obtain separate microchips for siren testing and real warnings.

Currently, both data are contained on one chip, which allowed for the false alarm Saturday, because the testing portion ended and rolled right into the real warning section, he said.

The bureau’s project manager, Bill Pennington, will meet today with city emergency personnel to walk through what happened Saturday and investigate the source of the malfunction, McCracken said.

Bureau officials also left a message Saturday night for employees at Acoustic Technology Inc., a Boston company that built the system.