Evacuation alerts never came for some residents
System worked as planned, official says. Yet it failed during outages caused by fire.
Taylor Craig and his family had a plan for how they would evacuate ahead of a wildfire. They knew which vehicles they would take and what they would pack. They signed up for every alert system they could and watched closely for the word to leave.
But as the lightning-sparked Hennessey Fire raced toward Craig’s northern Vacaville farm on the night of Aug. 18, those alerts never arrived. He and many of his Vacaville neighbors were forced to make harrowing last-minute escapes as the fire closed in, and now they want to know why.
The answer lies in a problem that has for years hampered California’s ability to safely evacuate homes and neighborhoods in the path of deadly wildfires: Messages telling people to flee often don’t quickly reach those who most need to get them, because power outages and the fire itself can make cellphone service unreliable.
While the state has started taking steps to remedy the problem, there are still gaps in the alert systems people count on during fast-moving fires or other natural disasters — when minutes and seconds could be the difference between life and death.
“I thought if there was a real danger, we’d be warned, especially given the agricultural nature of this area,” said Will Carlson, who rents a room on Craig’s farm.
“It blows my mind that we don’t have a cohesive fire plan,” Craig said.
Solano County Emergency Services Manager Don Ryan says there was a plan, and it worked, even if alerts didn’t reach everyone.
Ryan said the county sent evacuation warnings as the Hennessey Fire grew, including Amber Alert-style Wireless Emergency Alerts that set off every cellphone in targeted areas, and “reverse 911” calls to landlines with recorded messages telling people to evacuate.
“Our alerts went out,” Ryan said.
But he said the cellphone alerts might not have been received if nearby cell service towers lost power or were destroyed by the fire. And residents with Voice Over Internet Protocol home phone lines, which rely on a working internet
connection and power, might not have gotten phone calls.
The issue isn’t new: Power and service outages left many people in the dark, unable to get alerts or reach 911, during the Wine Country fires in 2017 and the Camp Fire in 2018. Those blazes combined to kill more than 100 people, many amid frantic attempts to escape the fires.
Last fire season, hundreds of cell sites in fireprone areas were knocked out of service after Pacific Gas and Electric Co. intentionally shut off power to reduce the risk of its equipment sparking blazes — which meant emergency alerts would not go through if a wildfire broke out anyway.
The California Public Utilities Commission in July adopted a new requirement that cell service sites have enough power to run for 72 hours during blackouts. But the commission gave companies a year to install the backup systems,
meaning they might not be in place during this fall’s fire season.
“The companies have had plenty of time” to recognize this flaw in their network in recent years, said Ana Maria Johnson of the Public Advocate’s Office of the CPUC. “California is facing (wildfires), it feels, yearround — we cannot afford to wait until next year for this to happen.”
And backup power solves only one problem: A power source might not matter if the cell tower itself gets damaged or destroyed.
Emergency alerts also are individually managed by each county, and officials and residents in this latest round of fires complained of glitches and unclear orders even when alerts were received.
As a backup to the alerts, Ryan said, Solano County deputies and firefighters went house to house as the flames advanced on the night of Aug. 18 and early morning hours of Aug. 19, knocking on doors to evacuate
neighborhoods.
But several residents along Pleasants Valley and English Hills roads — two major roads that snake through the rolling hills of the Vaca Valley where dozens of homes were destroyed — said in interviews in the days after the fire that they did not receive phone alerts or get warned by law enforcement personnel in person.
Some who lost livestock said they believe they could have saved the animals if they had more warning.
In a Facebook group for survivors of the fire that Craig created, about a dozen people shared stories of their escapes.
While a few reported that they had received knocks on the door from fire crews or law enforcement, none said they received alerts on their phones, even though many said they had signed up for the county’s public safety alerts, a program called Alert Solano.
Instead, several said they were woken up by neighbors
or calls from friends. Brandon Camber, a resident on English Hills Road, said he awoke only because the power outage turned off the air conditioning, making his house stifling hot. When he stepped outside, his neighbor’s house across the street was on fire.
Around 10 p.m. on Aug. 18, burned oak leaves were falling onto Craig’s property, carried over a nearby ridge by the wind, but he still had not received any alerts. Craig’s mother, who lives on the farm, eventually drove up the road and encountered fire crews driving back.
“It’s coming this way,” they told her.
Craig and others started hooking up trailers, trying to get their horses and goats loaded up to evacuate. But when the top of the ridge turned a glowing orange, they knew it was time to go.
Carlson was the last to leave, trying to load as many animals as he could before the fire closed in. He scrambled down Pleasants
Valley Road as flames roared down the hill.
“My windows were going to explode because of the heat,” he said.
The LNU Complex of fires, which includes the Hennessey Fire, had by Friday destroyed over 1,000 buildings and scorched more than 370,000 acres and was 35% contained. Two people in Solano County and three in Napa County died in the fire.
Ryan insisted the deaths in Solano County were not a result of problems with emergency alerts — one man refused to evacuate, he said, while another lived in a building with “no electronic means of communication.”
Thousands of people successfully got evacuation orders, Ryan said, preventing a bigger tragedy.
“The alerts were successful because virtually everyone got out,” he said. “I don’t see a perfect system out there that can make everyone instantly alerted — but we’re trying.”