A City In Florida Keeps Receiving Zombie Alerts

When the citizens of Lake Worth, Florida each received a public alert message in the middle of the night, they probably figured it was one of a million meth-related emergencies that can occur in the region. Instead they were warned of a sudden blackout. And a zombie apocalypse. So they went to back to sleep, because this is Florida we're talking about, and it wasn't the first time someone had cried "undead."

At 1:45 a.m. on a Sunday, a brief power outage hit about 8,000 homes in Lake Worth. The issue was resolved in 27 minutes, barely three minutes before the lack of air conditioning would've melted thousands of people. Wanting to calmly inform the citizens, officials sent a citywide notification of the outage. But what they actually sent was a "Power outage and zombie alert for Lake Worth and Terminusl" which said that many of the electrical company's customers had already died due to "extreme zombie activity." For the seven people who don't know the show, Terminus is a fictional town in The Walking Dead. So obviously its zombie alert was fake, unlike Lake Worth's.

Now, this news didn't shock the Lake Worthers. They'd gotten used to sightings of waxy-skinned hordes shambling their way through the swamp -- and not just because they live so close to Disney World. Ben Kerr, the city public information officer, told Gizmodo that ever since Hurricane Irma, their public message system has been sending out these weird warnings of an oncoming zombie invasion. And Irma was almost a year ago. Even Romero zombies aren't that slow. The city still doesn't have a lead on who's responsible for these prank hacks, but they're sure they've scrubbed the last of the zombie messages from their system. That way, according to Kerr, "the next time there is a zombie invasion alert, it will be a real zombie invasion."

With the U.S. having a bit of a fake emergency message epidemic right now, many have noted how dangerous it is to cry wolf on an official government channel, as that kind of untrustworthiness could cost lives when something actually happens. Then again, if there's any place that needn't worry about an undead apocalypse, it's Florida, where what doesn't kill you already migrated to Georgia. Zombism wouldn't even get into the top five worst infections you can contract down there. The biggest worry for Floridians is that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a supernatural flesh-eating zombie and a perfectly normal face-eating meth head. And between the rising water levels, the lizard infestations (both native and former pets), and the many many stray bullets everywhere, those zombies would get eaten ... well, not alive, but you get the point.

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