LA fire officials urge public to keep emergency notifications on despite erroneous alerts

Multiple erroneous evacuation emergency alerts have been sent to Los Angeles County residents' cellphones, sparking an "extreme amount of frustration, anger [and] fear," LA County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan said.

One alert was meant to go out to those in the surrounding areas of the Kenneth Fire, which broke out Thursday afternoon. An alert that was meant for the Calabasas and West Hills area was sent out to 10 million people, the office estimates.

Early Friday morning, another evacuation alert around 4 a.m. was sent in error to residents in Beverly Hills and the police department and the city then posted that this was a mistake. They say there are no evacuations currently affecting Beverly Hills.

The cause is under investigation and McGowan stressed at a news conference Friday that the alerts were not "human driven."

McGowan explained the alerts are supposed to go into an aggregator that then is supposed to send them out automatically. They believe there's an error somewhere in that system.

Even though the erroneous messages are "painful" and "scary," he implored the public to not disable their phone's emergency alerts.

"These alert tools have saved lives during this emergency," he said. "I can't express enough how sorry I am for this experience."