Fire Alert Failures -- the Connecting Thread Among California Wildfires
This "Communications Failures" slide recalls the experience of Paradise, CA residents during the November 8, 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 residents.
Questions rightly need to be asked when someone dies in an emergency. We owe it to the deceased and to ourselves to learn what went wrong, because the answers may prevent future deaths.
Unfortunately, lessons learned in one emergency don’t necessarily carry over to the next one. California wildfires, from last year and this summer, illuminate the problem.
The Sacramento Bee reported on July 29, 2018 about three family members who died when the Carr fire swept into their Redding neighborhood. No one in the family reportedly knew an evacuation order had been issued. According to a surviving family member, “There was no evacuation notice. Our evacuation was a mile-wide column of smoke rotating toward us.”
On October 15 of that year, the Bee displayed this headline: “Northern California wildfires expose emergency alert weaknesses in cellphone era.” The story said, “Those who escaped are now questioning why some people got emergency alerts on their phones, while many others got no warning at all.”
Ten months after a fire catastrophe that killed dozens, weaknesses are still evident in some communities’ emergency alert procedures. Questions must be asked.
Are alert procedures focused too intently on signals that can fail in a power outage and on relatively new social media, text messages, and cellphone alerts?
Each of those channels has its place, but so does another medium that seemingly is hiding in plain sight — time-tested radio.
AM radio once was the obvious communications choice during emergencies. During the Cold War era, CONELRAD (Control of Electronic Radiation) would be used during a nuclear attack.
CONELRAD was followed by the Emergency Broadcast System of designated stations equipped with electricity generators to sustain them during power outages. Those stations were heavily publicized.
Months after the Redding fire, neither the Shasta County nor the City of Redding emergency preparedness pages offered specific guidance about radio as an important, designated source of information.
The site’s Terrorism section mentions radio only in passing and advises citizens to “listen to radio and television for news and instructions.” Unlike that earlier era, there was no information on which local station will be a source of critical information.
The websites’ more prominent advice in the Family Disaster Plan section is to “learn about your community's warning signals: what they sound like and what you should do when your hear them.”
Emergency planners have a fondness for cellphone alerts and text messages, but radio, perhaps the most accessible communications channel of all, is virtually overlooked, with no significant promotion.
It’s past time for this hole in the communications plan to be fixed. Reintroducing low-tech radio into the mix could save lives during the wildfires that surely are in California’s future.
Unfortunately, lessons learned in one emergency don’t necessarily carry over to the next one. California wildfires, from last year and this summer, illuminate the problem.
The Sacramento Bee reported on July 29, 2018 about three family members who died when the Carr fire swept into their Redding neighborhood. No one in the family reportedly knew an evacuation order had been issued. According to a surviving family member, “There was no evacuation notice. Our evacuation was a mile-wide column of smoke rotating toward us.”
On October 15 of that year, the Bee displayed this headline: “Northern California wildfires expose emergency alert weaknesses in cellphone era.” The story said, “Those who escaped are now questioning why some people got emergency alerts on their phones, while many others got no warning at all.”
Ten months after a fire catastrophe that killed dozens, weaknesses are still evident in some communities’ emergency alert procedures. Questions must be asked.
Are alert procedures focused too intently on signals that can fail in a power outage and on relatively new social media, text messages, and cellphone alerts?
Each of those channels has its place, but so does another medium that seemingly is hiding in plain sight — time-tested radio.
AM radio once was the obvious communications choice during emergencies. During the Cold War era, CONELRAD (Control of Electronic Radiation) would be used during a nuclear attack.
CONELRAD was followed by the Emergency Broadcast System of designated stations equipped with electricity generators to sustain them during power outages. Those stations were heavily publicized.
Months after the Redding fire, neither the Shasta County nor the City of Redding emergency preparedness pages offered specific guidance about radio as an important, designated source of information.
The site’s Terrorism section mentions radio only in passing and advises citizens to “listen to radio and television for news and instructions.” Unlike that earlier era, there was no information on which local station will be a source of critical information.
The websites’ more prominent advice in the Family Disaster Plan section is to “learn about your community's warning signals: what they sound like and what you should do when your hear them.”
Emergency planners have a fondness for cellphone alerts and text messages, but radio, perhaps the most accessible communications channel of all, is virtually overlooked, with no significant promotion.
It’s past time for this hole in the communications plan to be fixed. Reintroducing low-tech radio into the mix could save lives during the wildfires that surely are in California’s future.
For much more commentary on this continuing problem, visit our Wildfire Crisis website, which received a Hermes Creative Gold Award in 2019. Another of our emergency communications sites -- Citizens Helping Officials Respond to Emergencies (CHORE) -- has commentaries on similar "official" failures going back to 2006. Not to be forgotten was one of the worst communication failures in modern times when the Christmas 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in the region, some as far away as Africa. See our Tsunami Lessons website, another Hermes Creative Gold Award winner.
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