Lake Worth investigating ‘zombie alert’

City spokesman Kerr says ‘right now I have no details on it.’

LAKE WORTH — So, who’s behind the zombie caper in Lake Worth?

At the moment, the city has no idea.

“There’s an investigation ongoing,” said Ben Kerr, Lake Worth’s spokesman. “But right now I have no details on it. It’s not information I can get into. It’s an outside investigation, and I have no idea (how long it will take).”

Early Sunday, about 1:45 a.m., a message was sent during a power outage; it also warned of a “zombie alert for residents of Lake Worth.”

“There are now far less than seven thousand three hundred and eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity,” the notice said. “Restoration time uncertain.”

Kerr said when a power outage happens in the city, the system automatically sends out a short message on its map so people can log in to see what’s going on.

“Those messages are pre-prepared,” Kerr said. “There’s literally thousands of them. At some point, some edits were made and that’s what you saw. Someone edited it with a zombie invasion going on.”

It wasn’t done by an employee or an ex-staffer, Kerr said the city found in its own investigation.

“No one was fired for it,” he said. “Now the system has been scrubbed and there will be no further zombie messaging until the actual zombie invasion comes.”

Push alerts have become common in our cellphone driven age, and this wasn’t the first to startle recipients.

■ In April, a fake nuclear attack warning was sent to Winnipeg, Canada, residents. It was a prank from an online video.

■ In February, the National Weather Service sent out a monthly “test” notice as practice for warnings about tsunamis. Some of those agencies, including the AccuWeather service, responded by sending alerts to their customers saying a storm was imminent.

■ In January, an error sent a warning about an imminent ballistic-missile threat to residents of Hawaii. Officials later said the alert was sent when a wrong button was hit.

Kerr said the hacking issue actually came up in Lake Worth during Hurricane Irma in September.

“But we caught it very, very quickly during the hurricane,” he said. “Those messages were popping up big on my screen, so as soon as I read them, I was able to shut it down and deal with it. We thought we got them all, but it turns out there was one hiding in the system.”

What was accurate was a power outage. Kerr said 7,880 customers were affected and that power was restored within 27 minutes.

He said the message didn’t interfere with the workings of Lake Worth Utilities.

“It was just amusement for people,” he said. “Just because there was a problem with the messaging system doesn’t mean that anyone got into the electrical utility or was able to cause any issues there.”

Resident Tammy Pansa said she thought it was funny.

“I thought it was a hoot,” she said. “I totally missed it overnight, but I saw it the next morning. Ben’s deadpan response to it was just classic. Sometimes Lake Worth needs a little bit of humor.”

Patti Sheldon, who said she never saw the message, couldn’t believe it was done.

“People just have nothing to do with their time,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”