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.
