Thomas Munoz, the deputy director of Homeland Security and Public Safety in Houston's Office of Emergency Management, said they ran into a technical issue when they tried to send the alerts to Houstonians' phones.
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Munoz said technically, they are only required in a boil water notice to send the alert to the media to relay to the public. He said there is certain criteria for major disasters that require them to use the emergency alert system and some flexibility in other instances.
"We wanted to go above and beyond for safety and make sure people knew," Munoz said.
They posted to social media and sent alerts out through the AlertHouston messaging system that they say reached 250,000 people.
It was Mayor Turner, according to Munoz, who made the decision to send out the emergency alert.
When they attempted to use FEMA's emergency alert system, Munoz said there was an error that they worked until the early hours of Monday morning to identify and correct.
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He said since then, they have put measures in place that ensure they do not have the same issue again.
"We have actually started adding some back-up systems to that to ensure it doesn't occur again," Munoz explained.
Munoz encouraged Houstonians to sign up for AlertHouston to receive additional information about the city.
"That allows them to get some of the safety information or just some of the information period in the event it doesn't meet that criteria," Munoz said. "We can still send that information to them."
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