Last week I named the counties where wildfire warnings failed. Fairness demands the follow-up; several of them did the hard work of fixing it. Here are five.
Sevier County, TN. The 2016 Chimney Tops 2 fire destroyed five sirens and knocked out the communications network. Today the county has nine new voice-capable sirens reaching beyond Gatlinburg, direct federal alert authorization so local officials can reach cell phones without an intermediary, and an emergency radio station on 1680 AM, a recommendation lifted straight from the fire's after-action report. They didn't just rebuild; they added the channel that doesn't burn.
Shasta County, CA. After the 2018 Carr Fire, the county contracted for Alert FM, which carries evacuation alerts over FM radio signals that keep working when cell towers fail. It has been operational since July 2022 across five local FM stations, and it is the only FM-band alert system among the fifteen jurisdictions we researched. Sevier's 1680 AM is a different kind of broadcast answer, a dedicated emergency information station. The county also rolled out evacuation zones and replaced its old opt-in alert system.
Boulder County, CO. Three months after the 2021 Marshall Fire, Wireless Emergency Alerts were live. Today the county pushes alerts in more than 100 languages, runs a text-messaging program with full language access, and texts residents whose numbers came from public records; no signup required. The fastest turnaround we documented.
Paradise, CA. After the 2018 Camp Fire killed 85 people, the town installed 21 warning sirens with solar-backed power and redundant radio and satellite links. The town's own September 2026 Emergency Notification System guidelines list AM 1500 as a permanent component, activated by the public information officer to reach residents who may not have internet or cellular service. A town that lost everything now has a station on the dial.
Los Angeles County, CA. This weekend, when the Bryson Fire broke out near Malibu, evacuation orders went out in zone codes through the Genasys system built after the Woolsey Fire's "Know Your Zone" reform. No warning failure has been reported. The reform worked, live, under a Red Flag warning.
One more is on the bench. Maui County reports it is working with radio broadcasters and funding backup power for a main radio station after Lahaina. It is reported, not yet officially sourced; we'll name it when the record confirms it.
No system is fireproof, and none of these communities has been tested by a fire like the one that burned it. We don't claim these fixes guarantee the next outcome; we claim something simpler, which is that these communities did the work.
Reform works. The communities above prove it. Three of them now carry a broadcast layer, the kind that survives when the towers burn. The question goes to every community that hasn't reformed yet: When the towers burn, what's your plan?
SOURCES: The full jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction record is in our upgrades appendix, with a confirmed/reported/unknown rating for each of the fifteen. For the cases above: the Chimney Tops 2 After Action Review (official) and Knox News coverage of Gatlinburg's upgrades; Record Searchlight's reporting on Shasta County's Alert FM contract and rollout; Boulder County Office of Disaster Management's official emergency-alerts pages; the Town of Paradise's official September 2026 Emergency Notification System guidelines (AM 1500, activated by the PIO, for residents without internet or cellular service) plus AP reporting on the siren system; Los Angeles County's after-action portal and its "Lessons Learned" page on the Eaton and Palisades fires. Maui's broadcaster work is reported by Maui Now through the MEMA administrator and stays on the bench until an official source confirms it.
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