Improved Public Information System Needed To Save Lives during California Wildfires in the New Abnormal

More lives were lost in the November 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, CA than in any other fire in the state's history. As of November 20, the count had reached 79, with hundreds of residents still missing.

Survivors have complained they received no warning as flames raced into the community of 27,000 and destroyed nearly every structure. 

As reported widely, officials did not activate a warning system that was designed to issue evacuation alerts. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reports:

“Like Sonoma County officials last year, authorities in Butte County are coming under attack for not issuing a wide-spread emergency message to cell phones, known as a Wireless Emergency Alert, or WEA, when the fire broke out.

“The high death toll of the Camp Fire is in large part due to people failing to learn of the danger and quickly evacuate. Several burned in their cars.”

Officials said the fire was so hot and fast-moving that “devastation is inevitable, especially as the climate continues to change.” Gov. Jerry Brown calls it the “new abnormal” in a warming and drying climate.

If that’s true, then California can anticipate many more fast-moving fires that will threaten to take untold numbers of lives in the years and decades ahead.

PUBLIC INFORMATION REFORM

No fire can outrun a radio broadcast, yet old-school radio has been overtaken in the new digital age by an over-reliance on cell phone technology that is highly vulnerable and unreliable in wildfires.

The highly-structured incident command system unfortunately may be one reason critical information is slow to reach the public in an emergency – as counter-intuitive as that may seem.

The IC system values coordination among all the parties over fast entrepreneurial initiative by those charged with disseminating information to the public. That’s an opinion based on up-close observation when the writer had PIO responsibilities during the 2017 Oroville Spillways emergency.

CHORE’s sister website Wildfire Crisis lays out the basics for a broadcast-focused fast-acting information dissemination system that is much more entrepreneurial than the widely used incident command structure.

Individual public information officers would be dispatched to (principally AM radio) stations and would be the on-air link between incident command teams and the public. The stations would be publicized in the calm time between emergencies as the public's sources of critical crisis information.

That’s not happening today, yet each fire brings more survivor accounts that they didn't receive a cell phone alert or any other warning. Reform clearly must happen in the “new abnormal.” 

What remains to be seen is whether those charged with command of the current system are flexible enough to admit the failures and adapt to new ways of alerting the public -- ways that actually save lives.

Have Crisis Managers Forgotten Radio? Redding’s Emergency Preparedness Page Mentions Radio Only in Passing re Alerts about Threats and Evacuations

The Sunday July 29, 2018 Sacramento Bee reported that the Bledsoe family, which lost a great-grandmother and two great-grandchildren in the Carr fire that’s been raging in Northern California, had no idea an evacuation had been ordered. 

Is there no organized communications effort among all responding agencies in these crisis situations directing people to tune to one designated emergency radio station? Even flip phone owners presumably have access to radio. A multi-channel communications effort to direct people to listen for fast-changing alerts and evacuation orders on ONE RADIO STATION appears to not even exist. There isn’t a station owner or manager alive who’d refuse an official request to become the go-to station in a crisis.

Regarding the above headline: The City of Redding’s Emergency Preparedness website — https://www.cityofredding.org/departments/fire-department/prevention/emergency-preparedness — mentions radio only in passing as a reliable communications channel during life-threatening emergencies. Here’s the site’s advice: “Learn about your community's warning signals: what they sound like and what you should do when your hear them.” But it has nothing like this: “Station (XYZ) is the designated emergency broadcast station in this region. Tune to (station’s frequency) to stay informed about threats to your safety.”

If electricity is cut to a siren or the site’s battery is dead, that warning signal won’t happen. It’s as if all of crisis response has fallen in love with “signals” and social media and texting and “push messages,” leaving the broadest form of communication in yesterday’s dustbin. This is bad public policy! Don’t authorities have a plan to use radio — the most reliable and accessible communications tool — in a crisis?

Another issue: The Bledsoe family’s tragedy is especially hard to understand since one of the aunties told the Bee she could see from the checkpoint that halted her effort to save her relatives that the family’s house hadn’t yet burned. She was stopped by authorities from rescuing the great-grandmother and the kids. What’s the protocol when someone tells authorities “...but they’re RIGHT THERE! I CAN SEE THE HOUSE!!” Nobody goes? Nobody in authority goes? They stand their ground but don’t otherwise respond to this kind of incoming intelligence?

Emergency planners aren’t immune from scrutiny. It’s how mistakes are avoided in the next crisis. The Sonoma County fires last fall resulted in many post-action assessments of what went right and wrong. One of the first corrections that needs to happen NOW is incorporating old-fashioned-but-reliable AM radio into the emergency communications protocol. Relying on text messages and all the high-tech channels may be trendy, but it’s costing lives. Not including radio in emergency notification borders on the irresponsible.