This bit of nonsense originated with Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management, an agency with a reputation for making things up.

The number of Oregonians told to evacuate because of unprecedented wildfires is more than 40,000 – not the 500,000 residents initially and erroneously announced by Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management, Gov. Kate Brown acknowledged Friday following publication of an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive showing the true number of evacuations to be far lower.

Source: Oregon initially said 500,000 people had been evacuated because of wildfires. The numbers didn’t add up — and the state backtracked. – oregonlive.com

This false report was covered nationally and internationally. When confronted with the error, OEM tried to defend it, then tried to deflect that the actual numbers didn’t matter.

They have now acknowledged their 500,000 estimates was off by a full order of magnitude. Will the national media fix their earlier reports based on false OEM data?

This claim was also widely shared on social media. Government mis-statements become instant “facts” widely shared.

I learned in 2017 to never, ever believe anything originating at OEM. They have a track record of massively inflated numbers.

Update: Heh – a couple of days later, OEM issued a social media poster saying that you should only rely on information from official sources like OEM to ensure you get accurate information! What a hoot! They have a history of issuing incorrect – and not a little incorrect but massively incorrect – information!