In the early days of the January firestorms, Los Angeles became an example of what can go wrong with emergency alerts and evacuations.
On Jan. 7, Pacific Palisades was in chaos as people in the foothills tried to escape but were caught in traffic. Then, when the Eaton Fire broke out in Altadena, residents on the west side were not ordered to evacuate until five hours after flames began threatening homes in the area. All but one of the 19 people were declared dead. were on the west side at the time of the fire at Eaton.
Two days later, a wireless evacuation warning intended for residents near a new fire near Malibu Canyon was mistakenly broadcast in the metropolis of 10 million people. Officials sent out a correction about 20 minutes later, but a stream of erroneous alerts continued to ring phones throughout the night and into the next morning, causing confusion and panic in communities 40 miles away from any active fire.
For many Los Angeles residents, the chaos and uncertainty surrounding evacuations and alerts added to the horror of the deadly fires. But the confusion had a more troubling consequence: a breakdown of trust. Some residents have turned to unofficial apps like Watch Duty. Others were so shocked that they concluded that they could not rely on the government at all.
Los Angeles is not the first community to experience life-threatening emergency disruptions during fast-moving fires. Small cities in California, Tennessee and Hawaii have seen a glaring lack of emergency alerts over the past decade as climate change has increased the risk of wildfires.
But Los Angeles County's failure to issue timely and accurate evacuation warnings — first to too few people in Altadena, then to too many — shocked emergency management experts across the country. Why wasn't the nation's most populous county, built on land vulnerable to severe fires, floods and earthquakes, more prepared?
“We're learning that when some of the worst scenarios fail, the people and systems responsible for public warnings seem to fall short,” said Thomas Cova, a University of Utah geography professor who specializes in emergency management. “This would not be that surprising in inexperienced, unprepared or under-resourced jurisdictions, but it is surprising in Los Angeles County.”
McChrystal Group impact report The investigation into the Eaton and Palisades fires found that the county operated with “unclear” and “outdated” policies when deciding when to send evacuation alerts, and emergency personnel lacked training and a clear chain of command.
However, almost a year after the fire, we still don't know exactly what went wrong in West Altadena.
Los Angeles County officials were unable to explain why alerts were delayed in west Altadena. Although independent reports have been published, they have shed little light beyond identifying problems with coordination, staffing and training.
“Without an explanation for western Altadena,” Cova said, “the specific lesson remains to be learned.”
The delay in notifications may not have been due to one error.
“Cascading failures are a common theme among disasters,” said Michael Gollner, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who leads it. Fire Research Laboratory.
To prepare for the next wildfire—or any other catastrophic disaster—Los Angeles County and other agencies can take several steps to warn people at risk.
Improve coordination, situational awareness and training
One of the biggest takeaways from the Palisades and Eaton fires is that county personnel lacked basic training and a clear chain of command.
McChrystal impact report found that the district was struggling to adequately track events as they unfolded and lacked well-established coordination tools. Alert policies and protocols, he said, were “unclear” and “inconsistent” and did not clearly describe the chain of command for decisions to issue warnings or evacuation orders.
The report recommends that the county update its policies and standard operating procedures and ensure that first responders and emergency management agencies clearly understand their roles and responsibilities when issuing evacuation notices.
He also called on the county to make the Office of Emergency Management, which operates as a division of the Chief Executive Office, its own department. Shortly after the report was published, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a proposal to restructure OEM into an independent department. “Lack of autonomy and fragmented powers,” the proposal says, “currently undermine its ability to effectively coordinate emergency management.”
To improve coordination, the report also recommended the county create a mandatory wildfire and evacuation training program for law enforcement officers and use technology to provide situational awareness training. The OEM, he said, needs to train more people on the basic functions of the Emergency Operations Center, such as alert and warning systems and situational awareness.
One way to improve coordination and situational awareness would be to train emergency managers in the same way that air traffic controllers are trained in simulators, Cove said. Another option is to use some kind of automated or artificial intelligence system to alert emergency managers where the fire is and where it is heading.
Invest more in emergency management
Many emergency management experts were stunned after the January fires to learn that the Los Angeles County Emergency Management Agency's annual budget was just $15 million. This lags significantly behind the budgets of similarly sized jurisdictions such as New York City ($88 million) and Cook County, Illinois ($132 million).
McChrystal's report called L.A. County's emergency response workforce “fundamentally insufficient,” noting that it has 37 employees capable of reducing the risk to about 10 million people.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors directed the CEO to evaluate OEM staffing and funding. The department is expected to release the report next week.
In an October interview with The Times, Kevin McGowan, director of the Los Angeles County OEM, suggested that resource constraints were leading to “compromises” and “challenges in coordination and communication.” Increasing the budget and staffing is a key priority, he said.
McGowan said he has already started creating six new positions. This would bring the number of Los Angeles County emergency management employees to 43, a figure that still lags far behind jurisdictions of similar size. New York City has more than 200 emergency management personnel serving 8.5 million people.
Teaching clearer messages
Even when wireless emergency alerts were sent out during the January firestorms, many were poorly written and did not contain enough detail for such a sprawling metropolitan area, said Jeanette Sutton, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany who specializes in warnings.
“Almost every one of them is incomplete,” Sutton said.
The biggest culprit, she said, was a message that echoed throughout the county: it referred to a fire “in your area” without specifying the location or time. Sutton said the confusion caused by the message, which echoed throughout the county over the next 24 hours, could have been avoided if it had contained more accurate information.
For example, “An EVACUATION ALERT has been issued for Calabasas/Agoura Hills” instead of “An EVACUATION ALERT has been issued for your area.”
Should the state or federal government intervene?
Over the past decade, California has taken a number of steps to improve local warning systems.
After counties experienced a wave of alarm problems responding to a series of devastating wildfires in 2017, the California Governor's Office of Emergency Management released statewide information. notification and warning instructions And standardized alert language. He also developed best practices for county emergency plans and create Forest Fire Forecast and Threat Analysis Integration Center coordinate ways to identify, analyze and communicate wildfire threats to the public.
But government recommendations are recommendations, not requirements. State officials—and many local leaders—tend to resist the idea of comprehensive rules. They argue that the state's 58 counties have vastly different geography, populations and budgets, so it makes no sense to impose disaster preparedness plans from above.
However, many experts say there is a need for a more unified approach to the nation's fragmented emergency alert system. Some are calling for increased action from the federal government, noting that the alert problems are not just a local or state issue—jurisdictions across the country are facing similar problems.
Training on alerts and warnings at the national level is extremely poor, Sutton said. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency manages Integrated Warning and Public Notification System (IPAWS), a national public emergency warning system via mobile phones using Wireless emergency alerts (WEA), as well as on radio and television via Emergency Alert SystemHer role is limited, she said.
“We don’t have an organization that is responsible for providing training at the national level,” Sutton said. “You might think that's the role of FEMA or the IPAWS program, but they've focused almost entirely on the technological capabilities of pressing a button and broadcasting a message. They're not focusing on the messages themselves.”
In May, U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) published report on Los Angeles County emergency notification failures and called for increased federal oversight of the nation's emergency warning system. In September, U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-San Mateo) introduced a bipartisan bill, the Sustainable Emergency Communications and Training (REACT) Act, which would direct FEMA to allocate more federal resources and $30 million annually to local emergency officials to improve their alert and warning systems.
But the Trump administration appears to have little desire to invest in disaster preparedness.
“Things have kind of stalled at the federal level,” Sutton said.
If the Trump administration follows through on its promise to sharply cut FEMA spending, it's unclear what will happen to the IPAWS program or whether the federal government will abandon strengthening the nation's disaster preparedness entirely, Sutton said.
“Are they even going to focus on preparedness?” said Sutton. “Or they'll say, 'Hands off, we're done.' I don't know.”
