On Second Anniversary of California’s Camp Fire, a Look-Back on Lessons Learned – and Lost – in another Emergency. NorCal Fire Warning Failures Continue, so Let’s See What We Learned in 1982 during Hawaii’s Hurricane Iwa

California’s deadliest wildfire tore through the town of Paradise two years ago on November 8. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and left thousands displaced and grieving for their paradise, lost in the forests of Northern California.

I’ve been campaigning here at CHORE for improved wildfire alerts since even before that fire’s well-documented failures (archived site loads slowly), and I’ve generally avoided using the “I” word in these posts. This campaign isn’t about attracting attention to myself. 

 

But – I do have the kind of hands-on emergency communications experience that appears lacking in far too many California officials charged with emergency response. 

My September 21 post strongly hinted at what hands-on proactivity looks like in calling for “a new way of thinking, of taking action, of shouldering personal responsibility to save lives.” 

Learned Lessons Lost

Hurricane Iwa struck Hawaii in November 1982 and quickly forced me and the rest of Hawaiian Electric Company’s corporation communications staff to learn new lessons in crisis management. 

Once we realized we couldn't reach the media by phone, HECO’s action-oriented communications response included visits to the only radio station still on the air and all three Honolulu television stations. KHON-TV’s video compilation on Hurricane Iwa documented the storm’s damage and some of our communications outreach. 

I wrote a commentary for The Honolulu Advertiser on the 25^th anniversary of that crisis, noting that several lessons learned had been forgotten in the intervening years.

One year before the commentary was published, I launched CHORE – Citizens Helping Officials Respond to Emergencies – because Hawaii officials were demonstrating the kind of incompetence in alerting the public that we’re seeing now among California crisis communicators. If you doubt that assertion, just google “California wildfire alert failures.”

CHORE’s First Post:

Our Motto: It’s a CHORE, but somebody has to do it. 

Our Mission: To improve communications to the public during and after emergencies in Hawaii (and now California, too) by organizing the views of average citizens and submitting their proposals to the appropriate government officials and broadcasters to enhance their performance. 

Our Objective:  To ensure that Hawaii’s (and California’s) emergency response officials are performing at peak capabilities and efficiency during and after community-wide emergencies.

Many survivors of California wildfires since 2017 have angrily complained they never received alerts over mobile phone-based networks or any other medium that their lives were in danger. 

Undoubtedly, scores of victims who didn’t survive those fires perished because officials placed too much faith in high-tech networks that failed to do the job.

If any CalFire or local emergency management officials have found this blog and are still reading, my message to you is to rethink your communications protocols.

As I wrote here at CHORE on September 21, too many of you are not committed to ensuring that citizens actually receive your alerts!  

If your high-tech alerts fail, you fail! Put public information officers inside designated radio stations, work the phones at least as often as you activate your mobile phone alerts, and push life-critical information to citizens using AM radio when their lives are endangered.

Hawaiian Electric enjoyed tremendous public support – immediately following the hurricane and long afterward – simply because we were the first to reach out to them when their lights went out and tell them when they could anticipate restoration of HECO’s power. And we kept at it right up until power was restored two weeks later to the last residences.

Imagine how California citizens will react if you diligently improve your warning protocols to ensure their safety during an era of ever-worsening wildfires. 

You owe it to them to do better! 

Finally, Some Media Focus on Tragic Wildfire Fact: Systems That Warn People about Evacuations Have Dangerous Drawbacks. Millions of Californians Rely on Alerts That May Never Arrive. Another Fact: AM Radio Rarely Fails in a Crisis

 

Taylor Craig stands on the edge of his family's property outside of Vacaville, CA on Oct. 2020. Craig fought off the flames and protected his home after not receiving any evacuation warnings. Photo by CalMatters.

CalMatters, the nonprofit journalism venture based in Sacramento, CA, recently turned its health intern loose to examine why so many wildfire alerts and warnings have failed in California’s 2017-2020 mega-fire season.

 

The resulting 2,700-word-plus article is must-reading for anyone responsible for planning and executing digital messages designed to keep people safe from wildfires.

 

One drawback of these systems is that they often require citizens to sign up or register to receive messages communicated over cell phone networks.

 

Ken Dueker, Palo Alto’s Office of Emergency Services director, told CalMatters: “You’ve got to sign up and, frankly, very few people do…. 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.”

 

Wildfire Fact: Systems designed to communicate evacuation warnings to citizens are failing at an alarming rate. Cellular networks fail, towers burn down, responders make mistakes, s--- happens.

 

Not all failures can be anticipated, but the same failures are happening time and again. That leads CHORE to again ask the question this blog posted on September 13:

 

At what point do we begin holding officials responsible for wildfire deaths when they clearly fail to learn from previous warning failures?

 

It’s a serious question that demands attention. When officials acknowledge a warning system’s failures to adequately function during a crisis, citizens deserve to know what government is doing to work around whatever caused those failures.

 

CHORE finds it extraordinary that AM radio is not mentioned even once in this long article. Did officials queried by CalMatters fail to mention radio to the writer? 

Small-town radio stations with local ties and connections could be filling a critical role in wildfire communications. An emergency warning plan involving these stations would emphasize ongoing personal interaction with station staff rather than button-pushing to activate digital alerts. 

 

Public Information personnel in government would be on the phone with station personnel, providing up-to-the-second information on where a fire is, where it appears to be heading, the neighborhoods that require evacuation NOW, and other essential Information citizens require to be safe. 

That’s the critical information citizens now complain they’re not receiving from local government.

 

Public Service Announcements aired on the stations during quiet times between emergencies would educate the public to listen to the station during emergency times.

 

Creating such an ongoing system of cooperation between emergency communicators and local AM radio stations doesn’t require “finesse,” but it does require an Entrepreneurial Spirit that may be absent in government.

No Finesse Required

 

The CalMatters piece quotes officials on why progress is so slow in fixing the warning failure problem. "I'd have to hunt down 130 different utilities," said the Mendocino County Emergency services Coordinator. 

That comment suggests officials are over-thinking the problem. A relationship with one or two radio stations per county could close the information gap.

 

Officials don’t need to give up their digital alerts. They can continue using them, but knowing that those alerts are prone to failure, they rightly can build in AM radio – a virtually failsafe medium – to convey critical information to the public.

 

Making the fixes is not rocket science. AM radio can be an efficient way to work around digital media’s fatal drawbacks. Thinking outside what goes for the current "box" requires a problem-solving entrepreneurial approach that seems hard to find among alert planners.

 

Government owes the public at least that much.

Yet Again, NorCal Residents Flee Wildfires in Panic, with No Warning or Time To Save Valuables; Yet Again, Something's Not Right

 

The news out of California this morning is all about wildfires. Several erupted over the weekend, as covered by the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle. The photo was taken early today in Santa Rosa, CA. 

An NPR newscast this morning carried an interview with a Santa Rosa resident whose voice communicated the panic she felt when forced to flee with no warning. 

It will take time to evaluate what went wrong with the warning process, once again. "Blame," and that's what it should be called, may spread over to residents, and it will take time to know why some residents were outside the warning bubble.

But blaming victims is never correct. If blame needs spreading, it must cover those whose warning systems fail to alert residents early enough to allow a less-than-panicked exodus.

Old School Solutions

Air raid sirens in the middle of the night wake people up. Emergency vehicles with European-style high-low sirens can do that, too (some California communities have installed them). AM radio, a CHORE favorite, is an old-school communications medium that is virtually fail-safe and requires no sign-up to receive alerts, as this blog has argued repeatedly.

Reporters presumably will examine how well higher-tech channels performed during these new fires. But if the past is a guide, as reported by our original Wildfire Crisis website (no longer active but archived here), survivors will once again complain about being beyond the reach of warnings that were sent via ineffective channels.

It's a chain that must be broken.

Fixing California’s Wildfire Alert Failures Requires a New Way of Thinking, of Taking Action, of Shouldering Personal Responsibility To Save Lives

 California's 2020 wildfire report likely will include scores of deaths before the last of the fires adds its acreage and fatality numbers to the total.

Since 2017, the death toll from wildfires is above 150, and the state’s historical fire season still has weeks to go as the calendar turns to Fall.

 

CHORE insists that  many – maybe most – of those deaths could have been avoided if warnings had been easily accessible by the victims. Numerous media reports beginning with the Tubbs Fire in 2017 carried accounts of survivors’ angry assertions they received no warning.

 

“Received” is the action word in that sentence. It’s not enough to simply transmit warnings; they must be received to be effective.

 

Too many officials – from warning protocol planners at the State level to county sheriffs – are not committed to ensuring the public receives their alerts. If they were so committed, survivors would not complain of warning failures.

 

A New Way of Thinking

 

And that’s where a mindset shift is desperately needed. We asked in our most recent post here at CHORE: At What Point Do We Begin Holding Officials Responsible for Wildfire Deaths when They Clearly Fail To Learn from Previous Warning Failures?

 

Officials must be committed to implementing systems that do not fail! They must focus on systems that ensure warnings are received and acted upon by people in peril. 

 

Public radio station KQED of San Francisco carried one of the many media reports on wildfire warning failures, this one in Santa Cruz County:

 

“Some residents who barely escaped the latest fast-moving fires say they need a seamless system that crosses county lines and gives clear, useful information about what is happening. They want evacuation maps to accompany written descriptions posted on social media to make it easier to see what areas are in danger, and they want all counties, regardless of size and resources, to give accurate and timely alerts. Some people did not get warnings; others say they went out too late.”

 

CHORE has been advocating just that for years – a seamless system that crosses county lines. That system is called AM Radio, and it’s hiding in plain sight.

 

Commitment to Success

 

Radio is a mass medium that communicates to mass audiences, even those living beyond cell phone coverage. Radio doesn’t require listeners to sign up for a service, as do some systems that rely on cell phone technology. Radio transmitters rarely burn down, as is common with cell phone networks.

 

All radio needs to be an effective wildfire warning system is a commitment by officials to include radio in their schemes to achieve success in communicating alerts. 

 

That commitment is obviously lacking today. Too many officials fail to accept personal responsibility for ensuring messages are transmitted in ways that have a high likelihood of being received.

 

Officials can’t think their job is done when they’ve hit the button to transmit their Wireless Emergency Alerts and text messages over cell phone networks. 

 

Those networks fail. People don't turn on their phones. Their batteries are dead. Whatever, those networks fail to deliver messages that must be received.

Officials must implement virtually fail-safe AM radio as a medium that “crosses county lines” and avoids failure-prone mobile phone networks. See our earlier CHORE posts that describe how such a system could work. Also, go to our Wildfire Crisis website, which no longer is active but is still reachable via The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (be patient as it slowly loads).

 

The most important change of all would be for officials to take personal responsibility to do whatever it takes to ensure success of their wildfire warnings.

 

Success will be achieved only when populations endangered by wildfires actually receive those warnings. 

 

Until then, the only word that accurately describes their efforts is failure.

At What Point Do We Begin Holding Officials Responsible for Wildfire Deaths when They Clearly Fail To Learn from Previous Warning Failures?

 Northern California wildfires raged on during the September 12-13 weekend, and newspapers duly reported on more warning failures:

San Francisco Chronicle: “Wildfire warning systems by text, email, cell phone alert or reverse 911 call can’t always reach everyone in remote areas where coverage isn’t available, or when power or service cuts off. And sometimes, as happened in this season’s lightning-sparked blazes, the system can’t keep up with the speed and unpredictability of wildfires. Officials with Cal Fire confirmed that there was no evacuation warning for Last Chance, and that the evacuation order came just after 10 p.m. Sheriff’s deputies had no time to go door to door.”

Let that last bit sink in: “Sheriff’s deputies had no time to go door to door.”

Is that really the alert protocol when cell phone notifications fail? Deputies go door to door?

San Francisco Chronicle: As soon as Cal Fire sent word of the imminent danger, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea sent out an evacuation warning to the town around 3 p.m. Tuesday, and then an order 45 minutes later.... Some residents left immediately. Others, lulled into complacency from their past experiences, didn’t. Still others said the lack of communication services left them in the dark about the risks, with some but not all residents receiving push alert notifications to evacuate on their cell phones.

This blog has been promoting AM radio, a mass medium, as an efficient way to send wildfire warnings to mass audiences. Have fire alert planners even heard of AM radio? Are they so in love with digital systems that old-school radio isn’t even an afterthought?

NEWS FLASH: Radio waves travel faster than deputies going door to door!

To make an evacuation plan supplemented with radio messages work, planners have to think outside the box and outside the fire season. That’s when much of the work must be done. 

Planners must create relationships with radio stations. Napa County has done that with station KVON, which was critical in informing residents of their peril during the 2017 Wine Fire. The Napa County grand jury even wrote, “Radio saved the day.”

Public Service Announcements must be created and aired in the quiet times between emergencies over one designated station to educate civilians on listening to that station for life-saving evacuation information. Message repetition will condition civilians to react quickly and search out those evacuation warnings.

Officials must be trained to keep radio stations informed when a crisis strikes. Lists of telephone numbers not available to the public must be compiled for those key stations. And it all must be rehearsed time and again during quiet times so officials know how to get the word out and radio stations know how to react.

This is not rocket science, yet it does appear to be beyond the learning curve comprehension of far too many wildfire warning planners.

Loa Angeles Times: There are troubling parallels between this (Berry Creek) fire and the fast-moving inferno that burned down much of Paradise two years ago, killing more than 80.... In both cases, some residents said they did not receive warnings to evacuate and ultimately chose to stay or were unable to leave.... Incident records and interviews by The Times found that the protection of those in harm’s way was hindered by evacuation orders that came by surprise, went unheeded and were impaired by a power outage.

If survivors complain fire after fire that they never received a warning of the danger they were in, and if officials know that power outages and other emergency conditions impede the delivery of messages sent over cell phone networks, at what point do we begin holding those officials responsible for their repeated failures to safeguard their county’s citizens?

Maybe reporters covering these tragedies can put the issue to officials as directly as that!

Wildfire History Repeats; Officials Keep Trying To Push Warnings to Residents Using Systems that Just Don’t Get It Done, Even as AM Radio Is Under-Utilized

The philosopher was right: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

 The Northern California wildfires this week are showing how right he was. 

 

Emergency managers continue to screw up evacuation messages to residents that are meant to save lives. From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

Sonoma County officials are trying to rectify mistakes made with its various emergency alert systems that at times this week have either gone to the wrong area or even included evacuation orders from previous wildfires.

 

The Los Angeles Times took note of alert confusion and failures in an August 25th story headlined “California emergency alert system experiences some problems as monster fires raged” (subscription required):

And then there is Sonoma County, where, unlike three years ago when the previous emergency management director failed to alert some residents of a fire at all, the department’s current leader is concerned with having alerted too many. “Using this system is like doing your taxes every time,” Chris Godley, Sonoma County’s director of emergency management, said of their alert software. “It’s a very challenging, technical process each time you do this, even though we’re relatively well-versed.”

 

Not to pick on Sonoma County, but if it has a phone-based system that’s too “challenging” and “technical” to make work, maybe it should try something else – something really really simple like AM radio.

 

Hiding in Plain Sight

 

We’ve been promoting century-old ubiquitous AM radio in the wake of repeated emergency management failures to issue effective evacuation warnings during Sonoma County’s Tubbs Fire in October 2017 and Redding’s Carr Fire in 2018.

 

A warning system has obviously failed if fire survivors say they never heard a warning. Many who escaped the Camp Fire that killed 85 in Paradise, CA in November 2018 said they received no warning.

The Wildfire Crisis website (now inactive but findable using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) didn’t just criticize; it had a proposal for An Improved Emergency Alert System Using Radio. Check it out at the link, but here’s the essence:  

Once a crisis is close at hand, as it was in Redding during the Carr Fire and Paradise's Camp Fire, the system of emergency alerts would be activated, but unlike those incidents, AM radio would be an official part of the mix. Public information officers and other official spokespersons (battalion chiefs, incident commanders, etc.) would include the designated station in their outreach. A PIO would be sited at the radio station to be a conduit for evacuation orders from the field straight to the public over the radio. If not actually positioned at the station, PIOs and others would push this critical information to the public over the designated station. As noted at the CHORE website, there’s not a station owner or general manager alive who’d refuse the opportunity of being THE go-to station for news and information critical to the community.

 

To some extent, this already is being done by Napa County’s Emergency Services office. The County specifically directs residents to KVON AM for emergency updates and has a contractual relationship with the station for public service announcements throughout the year.

 

KVON was so useful during the 2017 Wine Fire that the County Grand Jury’s report on the emergency said: 

“When the power went out, and the public could no longer receive information from TV, the Internet or (warning system) Nixle, it was old technology that saved the day. Residents got in their cars or dug out their batter-powered radios to tune in to KVON.” Napa County Supervisor Belia Ramos said,” Radio became what Nixle could not be for us because of the cellular system going down.” 

 

Napa County gets it. Will emergency planners and managers elsewhere fall even a little out of love with their phone-based digital systems and include AM Radio as a warning tool?

 

Only future wildfires will tell.