Some Montgomery County residents say they never received a warning from the county on their cellphones as a tornadic storm swept through Wednesday evening, but the county reports its alert system worked properly to their knowledge.
As a tornado left a trail of destruction from Poolesville to Gaithersburg, many residents received national alerts on their phones while some received notifications from Alert Montgomery.
But some say they didn’t get them.
“We’re not aware of anyone, at this point, who had an actual problem with their alerts. That’s not to say someone didn’t,” said Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security Director Earl Stoddard.
He said the alerts are highly focused to areas that are impacted, which is determined in coordination with the National Weather Service.
“All of these alerts for tornado warnings are dictated by the National Weather Service polygons,” Stoddard said. “So, they tell us where the alert is. They send the information over to us, and it automatically goes, meaning we do no interpretation, no manipulation of the data. It’s an automatic feed to allow for expedited release.”
He said the county hasn’t found a problem with the system but will look into concerns if someone didn’t get an alert and believes they should have.
“So, I’ve had about a dozen people reach out to me personally, and in a couple of cases we haven’t had enough information to really figure out what happened with them, but inevitably I think the most common thing is that people were outside the alert zone and they believe they should have been inside the alert zone
They will work with the National Weather Service to make sure the system works as it should.
“If people were supposed to get alerts and they didn’t, that’s an error that we need to fix either with ourselves or with National Weather Service, but right now, so far, the users that we’ve gotten — and we’ve provided feedback to every person that we’ve been able to confirm — all we’ve talked to were outside the alerting zone,” Stoddard said.
To get notifications from Montgomery County, residents must register with their address.
