These California Counties In Fire-Prone Areas Don’t Have Access To A Federal Emergency Alert System

Speaker 1: 00:00 Whether it's an earthquake, flood or wildfire. Will you be notified if a disaster is heading your way? Many people who fled last year's campfire did not receive emergency alerts. As we enter this year's fire season. Capitol public radio is Bob Moffett. Looks at what happened on the morning of November 8th in paradise and Butte County and how other communities are responding. Speaker 2: 00:25 She's a the, it's about the Chelsea road, the speed of the campfire to everyone, including first responders by surprise. The morning of November 8th [inaudible] structures on fire, the fire traveled Speaker 3: 00:35 miles and 70 minutes from a remote area of Butte county to the town of Paradise. Gloria, right lived there. Speaker 4: 00:41 The flames are 75 feet in the air coming at us, so you only had about six minutes to get outta there. So there wasn't any morning system yet, Speaker 3: 00:49 but there was a warning system. The question is, did it work? You county incident commanders ordered eight emergency alerts in the first three and a half hours. Speaker 2: 00:57 The fire drill, they get that code right Speaker 3: 01:01 doorways. The county emergency communication center took about 15 minutes to enter each of its early orders into its code red computer system, which then sent Robo calls, texts and emails, Speaker 2: 01:10 mandatory evacuation. California Speaker 3: 01:12 division chief John Messina was one of the incident commanders. That is not unreasonable. Each search is always a reflex time in any order you give in any op type of operation. But then the doorways grew to 30 then 40 minutes code red logs show, no notifications were sent to the Western neighborhoods of paradise. There were also communication problem, Speaker 5: 01:31 paradise police, how can I help you? Speaker 3: 01:33 Butte county didn't tell paradise police dispatchers for 15 minutes that part of the town was under evacuation. Speaker 5: 01:39 Says that Speaker 3: 01:39 residents who called nine one one did Speaker 5: 01:41 beautiful, um, fire. Okay. Okay. We haven't been advised to that. Speaker 3: 01:48 Messina issued the first evacuation order for Paradise at seven 44 the paradise town hall didn't issue its until an hour later. Almost all of the numbers that paradise then called had already been notified by Butte county. Emergency alerts from the county failed to reach more than 5,400 of the 15,000 numbers called. Of those that did go through a little more than half were actually answered by a person the rest by voicemail. Butte county sent 5,900 texts and emails there no way to know how many people saw them in time. Often neighbors and first responders were the alert Speaker 2: 02:22 system. Speaker 3: 02:25 There were also phone outages. Verizon says all but one of its 14 towers survived the fire, but third party fiber optic cables did not. Other fire prone communities have made changes as they I a new fire season. Plaster Sacramento and Yellow Counties Respond to emergencies as one entity. They used an alert system called every bridge that helps them communicate to the public plaster Dispatcher Rachel Cleveland. It says a previous system was woefully ineffective. Speaker 4: 02:53 It dialed like one person at a time, so you'd like start with school notifications or a snow day at 6:00 AM and at 10 it would finish. Speaker 3: 03:00 She says it now takes 90 seconds to enter an order and send it to the public using any available call centers in the three counties farther south of Christie Mitchell with the Mariposa county sheriff's office says improvements to phone reception have been a priority at t and t, brought in some generator powered towers and then put them around the county to increase self service during the debt wildfire. Since then we've worked with Verizon, the working in the river canyon because of the Ferguson fires over in Lake County. Residents and remote areas came up with $100,000 and bought four sirens. That can be sounded by the sheriff using a radio transmitter, but they're just sirens. People still must call or go online to find out what's happening. Another notification method is the federal wireless emergency alert system where we, oh, which can send one message to an entire county, but 16 counties don't have access to it and incident commanders are reluctant to use it for fear of over notification changes. Do we have this year should allow longer and more targeted messages. The state of California has issued nonbinding guidelines for emergency alerts and communications. Cities and counties don't agree on everything, but they do seem to share a single goal, get as many people signed up for alerts as possible. Then hope people receive them. As we've seen in paradise, there are no guarantees. Speaker 2: 04:21 The town of Paradise is under mandatory evacuation Bar Moffitt in Sacramento. Speaker 6: 04:30 Uh.