City in Florida Mistakenly Sends Its Citizens Zombie Alert

The city of Lake Worth, Florida, mistakenly issued a zombie alert to its citizens early last Sunday morning following a power failure that left nearly 8,000 people without electricity.

The message sent by the city warning of zombies.

The message was sent at approximately 1:45 a.m. Sunday morning, and in addition to notifying citizens of the power outage, warned of a "zombie alert for residents of Lake Worth and Terminus." 

Terminus is a fictional town featured in television series The Walking Dead.

Ben Kerr, Lake Worth's public information officer, took to Facebook to correct the error.

“We are looking into reports that the system mentioned zombies,” Kerr said in a post to Lake Worth Live, a community Facebook page. “I want to reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently and apologize for the system message.”

According to Kerr, the message was one of thousands of prewritten messages used to explain outages, and likely created by a city employee as a joke.  The messages are prewritten to avoid having to type them out manually during an emergency.

“Basically, somebody thought it would be funny to have some zombie messages in there,” said Kerr.

The system has since been scrubbed of any remaining zombie messages.

“We have since gone through the entire system and made sure there are no more zombie messages,” Kerr said. “That will be the last zombie message going out.”

“I will alert anybody if there is a zombie,” he joked.