Warning calls reached few
Thousands of Sonoma County alerts unheard in crucial first hours, leaving many unaware
As out-of-control flames moved into residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night in October, Sonoma County turned to a relatively new alert system to contact people in danger.
The thousands of warning calls made, however, mostly went unheard, a Chronicle review of recently released data shows.
During the first five hours of the wildfires that started late Oct. 8, when many were still unaware of the unfolding tragedy, Sonoma County placed nearly 50,000 calls to cell and landline phones issuing evacuation orders. Only 15 percent of those calls were answered, leaving some residents with little notice of the rapidly spreading conflagration.
In certain areas decimated by
the blazes, an even smaller percentage of alerts were received.
As fires burned into the picturesque town of Kenwood, officials sent 770 recorded phone calls recommending people flee the area. Only 36 of those calls were picked up, adding to lingering questions about whether more could have been done to warn people in the fire’s path.
More than one-third of Ken-
wood, known for its wineries and resorts, was charred by the Nuns Fire. Across Sonoma County, 24 people died and thousands of structures were destroyed, making the firestorm one of the most devastating in California history.
“When you have a countywide incident that’s very fast paced, it obviously stressed the (notification) system,” said Kenwood Fire Chief Daren Bellach. “And it was something that I don’t think we or anybody had been prepared for.”
Local emergency managers said they used the tools they believed were most reliable to warn people about the fires. They also said the number of missed phone connections is misleading, because unsuccessful calls were redialed at least once.
Of the nearly 50,000 calls made, more than 13,800 were duplicates to the same phone number, county spokeswoman Jennifer Larocque said in an email. The records examined by The Chronicle did not identify redialed phone numbers. She also stressed that roughly 40 percent of the calls were either answered or went to voice mail, which the county considered to be a connection.
Still, the sparse level of warning in the most destructive and deadly hours of the blazes has drawn criticism from some Sonoma County residents, who say they were blindsided by the disaster. It has also prompted proposed legislation to standardize emergency notification systems in California and spurred long-sought upgrades to a federal system that can send Amber Alert-style warnings during a crisis.
Called Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEAs, those messages ping nearly all cell phones in a disaster zone, but also have the potential to reach many people not in immediate danger. County officials chose not to send such an alert in October, saying they feared causing panic and hampering first responders.
The decisions made in Sonoma County at the onset of the fires are being reviewed by state and local officials, and could contribute to far-reaching changes in how the public is warned about disasters in the future.
North Bay lawmakers introduced a bill Friday that would require all California counties to adopt and develop protocols for using the WEA system. One of the bill’s authors, state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said attempts at notification “failed” during the October fires.
“You don’t need to notify 100 percent of the people, but you need to get to a critical mass so people will start notifying each other,” said Craig Fugate, who, as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama, oversaw implementation of WEAs. “If people don’t know what’s happening until it’s too late, they may run out of time to act.”
Between 11:30 p.m. Oct. 8 and 4:30 a.m. Oct. 9, records show that Sonoma County officials made 49,858 calls through the SoCo Alert system, which focused on the small number of county residents who had signed up for the messages, as well as registered landline telephones in areas that needed to be evacuated.
Only 7,589 of the calls were answered; the rest either didn’t connect, went to an answering machine, or hit a busy signal.
SoCo Alert sent an additional 3,450 texts and emails as secondary notifications, and tens of thousands of people were contacted through Nixle, a separate warning program used during the wildfires that residents also had to sign up for. It’s unknown how many of the text and email messages were received, and there was probably overlap between the two.
Sonoma County Emergency Manager Christopher Helgren said officials did everything they could to warn people about the fires, but the speed and force of the flames, paired with their eruption late at night in many different locations, made it hard to contact everyone.
“An uncontrolled, erratic, unprecedented wildfire is probably one of the most difficult situations we can do this type of notification” in, Helgren said.
Power failures, congested phone networks and damage to cell towers and phone lines also made it impossible to contact some people. Nearly half of the warning calls sent during the first five hours of the fires could not be completed, which Helgren said was most likely because of impaired or overwhelmed telecommunication infrastructure.
Emergency notifications have reportedly failed to connect during many disasters, including a 2016 Tennessee wildfire that killed 14 and the blazes in Southern California that sparked last month.
“Whether people pick up the phone, I don’t have any control of that,” Helgren said, adding that the county deployed a multipronged approach to reach residents. “We had sirens, sheriff ’s deputies and firefighters going from door to door, we had neighbors notifying neighbors. The community really stepped up.”
Many people in Sonoma County said they learned about the fires only after being awakened by the sound of sirens or contacted by friends, family or neighbors. “It’s a testament to the strength of the community,” said Santa Rosa Vice Mayor Chris Rogers. “But it’s a shortcoming of an alert system.”
Sonoma County did not release specific addresses or phone numbers that received SoCo Alerts, citing confidentiality laws, but some areas decimated by the wildfires appear to have received little official notice.
At around 2 a.m., dispatchers recorded the first reports of fires on Coffey Lane, which runs through the middle of Coffey Park — a neighborhood that would be leveled by the Wine Country fires. Winds were quickly spreading embers and flames into trees, fields and homes, according to emergency dispatch records reviewed by The Chronicle.
Between 2:30 and 4 a.m., county officials sent 758 SoCo Alerts to residents on parts of the 3mile-long street calling for immediate evacuations. Only 54 of those calls, fewer than 1 in 14, were answered.
On Pressley Road, east of Rohnert Park, vegetation fires were reported early on Oct. 9, followed by calls for help to fight the blaze and rescue people. Officials sent 73 SoCo Alerts to the largely rural street at around 3:30 a.m. Just nine were answered.
The lack of a widespread warning may have contributed to people being caught off guard by the fires.
Between 11 p.m. Oct. 8 and 5 a.m. Oct. 9, emergency personnel were sent to more than 70 locations to help evacuate trapped residents; many more rescues were carried out but not formally entered into dispatch logs.
Stephanie Huang, whose Fountaingrove home was destroyed early Oct. 9, decided to flee only after her two sons saw the nearby Paradise Ridge Winery engulfed in flames.
By the time officers had rushed the family out to safety, the neighborhood was already burning. “I counted the number of houses standing on one hand, it looked like an atomic bomb went off,” Huang said. “The least they could have done is warn us. ... No phone call, no text message — nothing.”
Huang didn’t know about the SoCo Alert or Nixle warning systems before the fires. She had a landline phone, which the family kept in case of an emergency, and it’s possible the county tried to contact her but was unable to get through.
The street Huang lived on, Skyfarm Drive, received more than 150 warning calls on the first night of the fires, records show, but less than half rang and only 15 were answered.
“One of the best predictors of whether people evacuate is if they believe they’ve been told by officials that they need to,” said Jay Baker, a professor emeritus at Florida State University and an expert on emergency management. “It’s surprising to me how many people say, ‘We didn’t hear we were supposed to leave.’ ”
To receive cell phone warnings through the SoCo Alert system, residents must enroll in the program.
In June, before the fires erupted, only 2 percent of Sonoma County residents had signed up. An additional database of landline telephone numbers had the potential to reach about half of the county, Larocque said.
Troy Harper, general manager of OnSolve — which provides the technology behind SoCo Alert, as well as thousands of other notification programs across the country — said they strive to have at least 10 percent of county residents signed up for similar opt-in systems.
But Sonoma County began offering SoCo Alert only one year before the fires struck and it didn’t have time to build a robust database of phone numbers, Harper said. Last winter’s floods were the only other time the system was widely used.
State Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, said opt-in systems like SoCo Alert “simply are not adequate to inform the public about a natural disaster.” Considering its relatively low enrollment and the many failed calls during the first night of the fires, some have questioned why officials chose not to deploy the WEA system.
The federally administered program sends short messages, accompanied by a loud sound and vibration, to nearly all cell phones within reach of a cell tower. Wireless alerts are not affected by network congestion and are hard to miss because they sound off even if a device is muted. Only phones programmed to block the messages won’t receive them.
In December, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services used the system to warn millions of people in Southern California about growing blazes threatening multiple counties.
Former FEMA administrator Fugate said the notifications were designed specifically for unpredictable events such as wildfires.
“If I have a fast-moving, lifethreatening event in the middle of the night, I want systems that are going to wake people up,” Fugate said. “If you just get people up, at least they’re aware of their surroundings, they’ll seek out more information.”
Sonoma County emergency manager Helgren said he chose not to send a WEA during the October fires because it probably would have reached many people that were not immediately threatened, potentially causing traffic jams and inundating 911 lines.
“Our philosophy is we send the messages to those that are directly in danger, and without those assurances from WEA, I can’t use that tool,” he said.
County officials also said damaged cell towers could have impeded the warning system, but did not provide a timeline of when service in the area became compromised.
Emergency managers across the country have echoed Helgren’s concerns about wireless alerts, complaining that the system was unable to reliably target specific areas and could send only short, 90-character messages.
In November, after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma and the Wine Country fires highlighted those flaws, long-planned upgrades to make the system more precise and increase text character length were put in place by the Federal Communications Commission.
Objections from the wireless industry had stalled the upgrades for more than a year.
The decision in Sonoma County to forgo a broader alert is one that local and state officials have pledged to examine in the coming months.
In late November, County Administrator Sheryl Bratton wrote to the California Office of Emergency Services requesting it review the local notification system. State officials confirmed that they are conducting the inquiry as part of a broader report on emergency notifications used during the October wildfires.
Last month, state lawmakers also held hearings on how to improve California’s emergency notifications, which set the stage for the newly proposed bill that lawmakers hope will strengthen the patchwork of warning systems used statewide and require every county to adopt WEA.
“What we’re going to have to review is whether this was human error or a policy error,” said Santa Rosa Vice Mayor Rogers, referring to the notifications in Sonoma County. “And try and figure out how we correct that for the next time.”
“If I have a fast-moving, lifethreatening event in the middle of the night, I want systems that are going to wake people up.” Craig Fugate, head of Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama