LOS ANGELES (AP) — When disaster strikes, government emergency alert systems offer a simple promise: Residents will get information about nearby dangers and instructions to help them stay safe.
As the deadly LA wildfires and other major emergencies have shown, alerts rely on a complicated chain of communication between first responders, government administrators, third-party companies and the public.
Sometimes, the chain breaks.
After the wind-driven wildfires broke out in Southern California on Jan. 7, evacuation orders for some neighborhoods — including the part of Altadena where the majority of deaths occurred — came long after houses were reported on fire. On Tuesday, Los Angeles County officials approved an outside review of how alerts functioned in the Eaton Fire and Palisades Fire in response to residents’ demands. City officials declined to answer The Associated Press’ questions about a lag in some Palisades Fire alerts, though Fire Capt. Branden Silverman said responding to a fire and determining evacuation needs can take some time.
It’s an increasingly common issue. After-action reports and investigations revealed issues with alert systems in other California blazes: in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people in Santa Rosa; the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people in Paradise; the Woolsey fire, which started the same day and killed three in Malibu; as well as in Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes outside Denver; and in Hawaii’s 2023 Lahaina Fire, which decimated that historic town and killed 102.
It could take months to know why some evacuation orders lagged in the Los Angeles fires.
Several residents who lost homes in the Eaton Fire told the AP they received no notifications about their neighborhoods. For others, the first warning was an urgent text message in the middle of the night.
Susan Lee Streets, who signed up for alerts through Nixle, did not get any alerts specific to her west Altadena neighborhood before she and her family left of their own accord around 10 p.m. after losing power and cell reception.
“If we had even been informed that houses and other structures were burning down, we would have known better what was happening,” she said. “We almost went to sleep that night with two kids and a dog and two cats in the house.”
Only after 3 a.m. did she see a notification about evacuating her neighborhood on her phone. Destroyed along with the house are the Christmas ornaments she saved for her children, and countless other family keepsakes.
“We lost everything, everything,” Streets said, breaking into tears.
Tricia Wachtendorf, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said alerts have to be specific and clear. Research has shown that for them to be effective, people have to hear, understand, believe, personalize and confirm them before they react.
“Just because you send the message at 3 a.m. doesn’t mean someone is hearing it,” Wachtendorf said.
The hours between midnight and 3:30 a.m. appear to have been particularly challenging for first responders in Los Angeles County, based on an AP review of scanner traffic recordings and data from CalFire, the state’s chief fire agency; the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the Watch Duty app.
Resources were stretched thin, and hurricane-force winds had grounded air support, limiting authorities’ ability to get a top-down perspective on the flames.
Calls reporting burning homes were flooding in as embers blew onto roofs and yards. During one half-hour period, 17 new addresses were relayed to firefighters, even as some crews ran low on fuel.
