It took 108 minutes to cancel a false alarm about an incident at the Pickering nuclear plant on a Sunday morning in January because no one working in the provincial emergency operations centre knew how to rescind it, Solicitor General Sylvia Jones says.

“We had some gaps,” Jones acknowledged Thursday after an investigation by emergency management officials found “human error” and a number of “systemic issues” led to the alert that left many local residents fearing they had been exposed to potentially harmful radiation.

The report found duty officers in the emergency operations centre were relatively new on the job, had been working long shifts with a lot of overtime following abbreviated training sessions in an operation where pay had been cut for some staff as a result of jobs being reclassified.

“Lower pay may be impacting staff retention and hiring,” noted the report, which also cited a lack of familiarity of some staff with the alert system and dealing with communications failures, as well as supervisors who couldn’t settle on a solution to the false alarm. Senior civil servants were then contacted before the alert was cancelled and corrected at 9:11 a.m.

Jones summed it up this way:

“Too many people were involved and not enough of them understood what the next steps would be if one was sent in error.”

The “emergency alert” awakened thousands of Ontarians on cellphones, radios and TVs at 7:23 a.m. on January 12, warning of an “incident” at the Pickering nuclear power plant.

It was supposed to be a routine test during a shift change of duty officers but the screeching alert on a Sunday along with the mention of Pickering rattled many in the area, where potassium iodide tablets have been distributed to mitigate the effects of radiation in case of a disaster.

“It’s extremely shocking,” said NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, who questioned why it took almost two hours to issue an all-clear when the report stated the unnamed duty officer who sent the alert in error knew right away he had made a mistake.

“This is why we’re asking the question when did the minister know what happened? If she knew right away then she should have stepped up to the plate and let the people in the general area, the people around Pickering, know it was a false alarm,” Horwath added.

“If she didn’t know, and if almost two hours went by before she knew, then there’s something wrong internally that the minister wasn’t briefed. Either way, it’s a problem.”

Jones said the government has taken action on more than a dozen of the report’s recommendations to “make sure it doesn’t happen again” and has decided to “assess and review” staffing levels in the provincial emergency operations centre that also handles floods and other natural disasters.

One of those changes involves separate computer log-ins for the test and emergency broadcast systems.

“I’m not happy about it but at the end of the day I think that we have a better system,” Jones told reporters of the alert imbroglio, which follows more than a week of coverage about the problems Premier Doug Ford’s government is having with licence plates that can’t be read in some lighting conditions.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner said the report shined a light on some troubling problems.

“There will be human error in any system. The fact that it took so long to deal with the systemic issues around it raises serious questions.”

New Democrat MPP Kevin Yarde raised concerns about a portion of the report that found Pelmorex, the private company handling the broadcast part of the alert, appeared to be “calling the shots” as a correction was being debated by repeatedly recommending against a second alert, warning that people will get “alert fatigue.”

The erroneous alert had nothing to do with Ontario Power Generation (OPG), which operates the 49-year-old Pickering station.

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In the immediate wake of the snafu, Toronto Mayor John Tory blasted the “poor showing” by provincial emergency officials.

The first alert said it was meant to warn people living within 10 km of the Pickering station, which is five km from Toronto’s eastern city limits on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

In the wake of the false alert, OPG’s chief nuclear officer Sean Granville noted that in the unlikely event of an incident at the station, the Crown utility has “a sophisticated and robust notification process in place that we would immediately follow.”