Fire alert system is ‘totally inadequate’
Tracey Aldrich had never heard of CODERED, Butte County’s optin emergency notification system, until she came upon a roadblock leading up to her mother’s house in August. At the roadblock, police told her a firestorm was bearing down on her mother’s neighborhood in Berry Creek. Neither she nor her mother had received any evacuation warnings.
Aldrich’s 70-year- old mother needed help escaping but the only road was closed, so Aldrich asked sheriff’s deputies to escort her mother off the mountain. Her home survived with minor damage from the flames. But the harrowing experience last month left both mother and daughter shaken and frustrated that they were never alerted to the fast-approaching North Complex Fire, which killed 15 people in Berry Creek.
“She had no warning,” Aldrich said. “If I wouldn’t have been on my way to her house, she would have never known, and the fire would have ripped through there.”
A Calmatters review reveals that the systems that warn Californians about emergency evacuations have dangerous drawbacks. Millions of residents are relying on alerts that may never arrive because they didn’t know they needed to sign up for them.
Aldrich and her mother assumed, as do many cell phone users, that they are automatically enrolled to receive evacuation alerts in the event of a natural disaster.
But this is a common misconception. On one hand, most California counties do send cell phone alerts to people when wildfires are approaching and their neighborhoods are evacuated. But those alerts won’t arrive if their cell service is poor or they don’t have compatible cell phones.
To increase their chances of receiving local alerts, people need to actively register with their county. But very few Californians have done so.
In at least 13 fire-prone counties, less than 25 percent of adults are signed up for opt-in county emergency alert systems, according to a Calmatters review of the 25 counties that have suffered the state’s largest and deadliest wildfires. These systems send texts and emails and also phone people to warn them to evacuate during disasters like wildfires and floods.
Some of the state’s most vulnerable residents — elderly, non-english speakers and disabled, low-income and undocumented people — may be the ones least likely to sign up. That could leave them without alerts to evacuate, despite being among those who need the most advance warning.
“You’ve got to sign up and, frankly, very few people do,” said Ken Dueker, Palo Alto’s Office of Emergency Services director. “I don’t blame them because they don’t know about the tool — they falsely assume the government has these magic, omniscient powers to notify.”
“The public expects us to have more improved tools and more finesse than we currently do.”
In some cases, the failure to alert people has turned fatal, including during 2018’s Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history.
California’s opt-in warning systems are “totally inadequate and totally inaccurate,” said State Sen. Hannah-beth Jackson, a Santa Barbara Democrat who chaired the Legislature’s emergency management committee in 2017 and 2018.
“We find that most people, probably over 50 percent of people, do not opt in,” she said. “A lot of people, they don’t take the time, they don’t think they have the interest.”
Few enrolled in alerts
Even in counties that have experienced the state’s largest and deadliest firestorms, a majority of residents have not signed up for emergency alerts, according to data provided by county officials.
For instance, in Sonoma County, scorched by the 2017 Tubbs Fire that killed 22 people, only 20 percent of adults are signed up for the county’s emergency alerts. In Solano County, only 13 percent have signed up for Alert Solano.
Only 1 percent of adults in Fresno County — where the Creek Fire has destroyed more than 850 structures and is still burning — have signed up for alerts, as well as only 1 percent of the 7.9 million adults in Los Angeles County, which includes fire-prone Malibu and the San Gabriel foothills. In San Joaquin, Alameda and Santa Clara counties, it’s 6 percent, leaving millions of people in these counties unenrolled.
(Some cities within those counties have their own alert systems, so residents may be signed up for those, which are not included in the percentages.)
A few counties have fared better, although tens of thousands of people still aren’t enrolle there: In remote Mendocino County, 80% of adult residents have signed up, in Yolo County, 70%, and in Butte County, where 86 people died in the town of Paradise two years ago, 68%, according to county officials there.
Officials in one of the 25 fire-prone counties contacted by Calmatters — Contra Costa County — did not respond to requests for comment, and Lassen County could not provide the total number of registrants.
Sarah Johnson, who lives at the Emerald Hills Horse Ranch in Yolo County, said she only learned about her county’s opt-in alert system one day before she had to escape from the LNU Lightning Complex fire.
“The day before, I was trying to find more information on the fires, and I just happened to stumble upon the opt-in system, so I had no idea about it, prior,” she said. “It’s very concerning that emergency alerts would be opt-in only.”
She said she hopes the state will eventually move towards a universal system that registers everyone automatically, rather than leaving it up to counties to enroll residents.
Aldrich, the Butte County resident whose mother had to evacuate, said her experience opened her eyes to the fact that many of California’s most vulnerable residents — the elderly and those with disabilities — might not be signed up to receive emergency alerts.
“I don’t believe that everybody does have an idea about it, and if they do, they’re either elderly or don’t know how to sign up,” she said. “My mom, she knows how to use Facebook and that’s about it.”
Lt . Stephen Collins, Butte County Sheriff’s Office emergency manager, said “we encourage community members to sign up for Codered but ultimately it is up to the individual community member to sign up.”
Counties’ efforts to inform residents to sign up often rely on word- of-mouth or social media. San Mateo County Emergency Services Coordinator Jeff Norris said the county typically sees a large increase in signups following a major emergency. Bay Area counties are planning a joint advertising campaign on social media, he said.
Systems ‘just all failed’
Even people who are signed up to receive alerts don’t always receive them.
Taylor Craig said he’s enrolled in all of Solano County’s opt-in alert systems, so as the LNU Lightning Complex fire raced towards his Northern Vacaville farm on Aug. 18, his family’s plan was to stay in place until he heard from the authorities.
Power shutoffs, designed to reduce the risk of sparking fires, can shut down cell towers. “That is the known way of communication in these sort of emergency situations,” he said. “I get messages from Solano County, like, three times a week on the regular, so it was expected.”
Craig said he received phone alerts until about 4 p.m. the day of the fire. But then the communication from the county went dark.
“At midnight, the glow of the fire was a quarter-mile away from us, and I look up and see it’s completely, the sky is red,” he said. “And I was like, ‘oh, boy, we’re not going to get a warning, it’s not happening — there will not be an evacuation warning whatsoever.’ ”
“That was extremely frustrating to see that the systems you expect are going to kick in, just all failed,” he said.
He said he and his family managed to escape just minutes before the fire reached his property, which burned to within six inches of his house. More than 1,400 structures were destroyed in the blaze.
Cell service or power disruptions may have been the reason Craig was not alerted.
Le’ron Cummings, a spokesperson for the Solano County Sheriff’s Office, said that alerts were sent out in Craig’s area, but they may have been compromised by disruptions to cell service and power.
“Unfortunately, we can