This Florida City Issued a Zombie Outbreak Warning to Residents

We're all way more willing to believe that there's been a zombie outbreak than we acknowledge. It honestly seems strange that there hasn't been one yet. So, you have to wonder how many people immediately starting arming themselves and rationing on Sunday, when the citizens of a Florida city received an alert about a zombie outbreak.

Residents of Lake Worth, Florida received a message (shown above) about a power outage around 1:45am. But it also included a “zombie alert for Lake Worth and Terminus.” Terminus, by the way, is a location from the show The Walking Dead.

“There are now far less than seven-thousand-three-hundred-eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity,” the notice said, implying, one assumes, that there had been casualties from the roving undead. 

Lake Worth's public information officer Ben Kerr was quick to release a statement on a local Facebook page explaining that there were not, in fact, any zombies on the lose in Florida. It included this wonderful sentence: "I want to reiterate that Lake Worth does not have any zombie activity currently and apologize for the system message."

Kerr told Gizmodo that this isn't the first time Lake Worth has faced down the prospect of a zombie apocalypse. The city started sending out zombie messages during Hurricane Irma last year, though then they were able to manage the alert before the public was notified. The alerts are preprogrammed, so at some point someone entered the system and added a little zest to select messages out of thousands. 

“The actual power systems were not in any way compromised," Kerr clarified. "This is a separate messaging system that at some point has been compromised. They just added a zombie fantasy.”

The city has now reportedly removed all zombie messages from its alert system, so this will be the last false alarm. Let's just hope there's not a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario when the zombies do come.

h/tPalm Beach PostGizmodo

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James Chrisman is a News Writer at Thrillist. Send news tips to news@thrillist.com and follow him on Twitter @james_chrisman2.