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 But if the past is a guide, as reported by our original Wildfire Crisis website (no longer active but archived here), survivors will once again complain about being beyond the reach of warnings that were sent via ineffective channels.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!