Oregon Public Broadcasting

Portland emergency officials say Thursday's test of an emergency alert system appears to have worked.

A similar test a few weeks ago failed to reach even one percent of more than 300,000 communications devices across the Portland area.

Randy Neves, with the city's Bureau of Emergency Management, says this time went much better.

"To the extent that we don't need this system to reach a mass audience quickly, we're considering today's test a success. It's finally doing what the company, First Call, our vendor, said it would do." 

Neves says the company First Call initially thought the test would be complete within three hours.

Company and city officials say all 328,000 devices were successfully contacted -- after almost seven hours.

Emergency officials say the primary use of the emergency alerts will be for messages specific to certain neighborhoods, rather than citywide messages.

But officials have said they wanted to perform a "stress test" to see how the system would handle a high volume of alerts.