During the first days of the January firestorms, Los Angeles became a case study in what can go wrong with emergency alerts and evacuations.
In Pacific Palisades there was chaos Jan. 7 as people in the foothills tried to flee, only to hit traffic gridlock. Then when the Eaton fire erupted in Altadena, evacuation orders did not go out to residents of the west side until five hours after flames began to threaten homes in the area. All but one of the 19 people confirmed dead in the Eaton blaze were on the west side.
Two days later a wireless evacuation warning intended for residents near a new fire near Malibu Canyon mistakenly was blasted out across a metropolitan area of 10 million people. Officials sent out a correction about 20 minutes later, but a stream of erroneous alerts continued to buzz phones throughout the night and following morning, stoking confusion and panic in communities 40 miles from any active fire.
For many Angelenos, the chaos and uncertainty around evacuations and alerts compounded the terror of the deadly fires. But the snafus had a more troubling impact: eroding trust. Some residents turned to unofficial apps like Watch Duty. Others were so shaken they concluded they could not rely on the government at all.
Los Angeles is not the first community to experience life-threatening emergency alert failures during fast-moving fires. In the last decade small towns in California, Tennessee and Hawaii experienced glaring emergency alert shortfalls as climate change has intensified wildfire risks.
But the failures of L.A. County to issue timely and precise evacuation alerts — first to too few people in Altadena and then to too many — shocked emergency management experts across the country. Why was the nation’s most populous county, built on land vulnerable to intense fire, flooding and earthquakes, not more prepared?
“What we’re learning is that, when the chips are down in some of the most dire scenarios, the people and systems responsible for public warnings don’t appear to be up to the task,” said Thomas Cova, a geography professor at the University of Utah who specializes in emergency management. “This would not be that surprising in inexperienced, unprepared, or under-resourced jurisdictions, but it is surprising in L.A. County.”
The McChrystal Group after-action report on the Eaton and Palisades fires found the county operated with “unclear” and “outdated” policies when deciding when to send evacuation alerts, and its emergency staff lacked training and a clear chain of command.
Nearly a year after the fire, however, we still do not know exactly what went wrong in west Altadena.
L.A. County officials have failed to account for why alerts to west Altadena were delayed. And while independent reports have been published, they have shed little light, other than saying there were problems with coordination, staffing and training.
“Without an explanation for west Altadena,” Cova said, “the specific lesson has yet to be learned.”
The delayed alerts may not have been a result of one error.
“Cascading failure is a common theme amongst disasters,” said Michael Gollner, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley who leads its Fire Research Lab.
To prepare for the next wildfire — or any other catastrophic disaster — there are several steps L.A. County and other agencies can take to make sure they alert people in harm’s way.
Improve coordination, situational awareness and training
One of the big takeaways of the Palisades and Eaton fires is county staff lacked basic training and a clear chain of command.
The McChrystal after-action report found the county struggled to adequately monitor events as they unfolded and lacked streamlined coordination tools. Policies and protocols on alerts, it said, were “unclear” and “contradictory” and did not explicitly outline the chain of command for decisions to issue evacuation warning or orders.
The report recommended that the county update its policies and standard operating procedures and make sure that first responders and emergency management clearly understand their roles and responsibilities on evacuation alerts.
It also urged the county to make the Office of Emergency Management, which operates as a subdepartment under the Chief Executive Office, its own department. Shortly after the report was published, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a motion to restructure the OEM into an independent department. Its “lack of autonomy and fragmented authority,” the motion said, “currently undermines its ability to coordinate emergency management effectively.”
To enhance coordination, the report also recommended the county establish a mandatory wildfire and evacuation training program for law enforcement and leverage technology for situational awareness training. OEM, it said, should train more people in essential Emergency Operations Center roles, such as alert and warnings systems and situational awareness.
One way to improve coordination and situational awareness, Cova said, could be to train emergency managers the way air traffic controllers are trained with simulators. Another could be to use some kind of automated or artificial intelligence system to alert emergency managers based on where the fire is and where it is heading.
Invest more funding in emergency management
Many emergency management experts were startled after the January fires to learn that the L.A. County Office of Emergency Management’s annual budget is just $15 million. That lags significantly behind the budgets of similarly sized jurisdictions, such as New York City ($88 million) and Cook County, Ill. ($132 million).
The McChrystal report dubbed L.A. County’s emergency staffing “fundamentally inadequate,” noting it has 37 employees to mitigate risk for around 10 million people.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has directed the Chief Executive Office to evaluate OEM’s staffing and funding. The office is expected to issue a report in the next week.
In an October interview with The Times, Kevin McGowan, director of L.A. County’s OEM, suggested that a lack of resources led to “trade-offs” and “coordination and communication challenges.” Boosting his budget and staff, he said, was a key priority.
McGowan said he already started to create six new positions. That would bring L.A. County emergency management staff up to 43, a figure that still lags way behind similarly sized jurisdictions. New York City has more than 200 emergency management staffers serving 8.5 million people.
Training on clearer messages
Even when wireless emergency alerts were sent out during the January firestorms, many were written poorly and did not have enough detail for such a vast metropolitan area, according to Jeannette Sutton, associate professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany who specializes in warnings.
“Almost every single one of them is incomplete,” Sutton said.
The biggest culprit, she said, was the message that echoed all over the county: It referenced a fire “in your area” without specifying a location and did not reference a time. The confusion the message stoked as it echoed throughout the county over the next 24 hours could have been avoided, Sutton said, if it contained more precise information.
“An EVACUATION WARNING has been issued for Calabasas/Agoura Hills,” for example, instead of “An EVACUATION WARNING has been issued in your area.”
Should the state or federal government step in?
California has taken a number of steps over the last decade to improve local alert systems.
After counties encountered a spate of alert problems as they responded to a series of destructive wildfires in 2017, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services published statewide alert and warning guidelines and standardized alert language. It also developed best practices for county emergency plans and set up the Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center to coordinate how wildfire threats are identified, analyzed and communicated to the public.
But the state guidelines are recommendations, not requirements. State officials — and many local leaders — tend to resist the idea of across-the-board rules. The state’s 58 counties have vastly different geographies, populations and budgets, they argue, so it does not make sense to impose disaster preparedness plans from on high.
Still, many experts say there is a need for a more unified approach to the nation’s patchwork, privatized emergency alert system. Some urge the federal government to step up, noting that problems with alerts are not just a local or state problem — jurisdictions across the nation face similar challenges.
Training around alerts and warnings at a national level is extremely poor, Sutton said. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency operates the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS), the national system providing emergency public alerts through mobile phones using Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and to radio and television via the Emergency Alert System, she said, its role is limited.
“We do not have an organization that is responsible for delivering training at the national level,” Sutton said. “You might think that that’s the role of FEMA or of the IPAWS program, but they have focused almost entirely on technological capabilities of pushing the button and the message getting out through the broadcast. They do not focus on the messages themselves.”
In May, U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) published a report on L.A. County’s emergency alert failures and called for more federal oversight of the nation’s emergency alert system. In September, U.S Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-San Mateo) introduced a bipartisan bill, Resilient Emergency Alert Communications and Training (REACT) Act, that would direct FEMA to provide more federal resources and authorize $30 million annually for local emergency officials to improve their alert and warning systems.
But the Trump administration appears to have little appetite to invest in disaster preparedness.
“At the federal level, things have kind of stalled,” Sutton said.
If the Trump administration follows through on its vow to make drastic cuts to FEMA, Sutton said, it’s not clear what will happen to the IPAWS program or whether the federal government will back off entirely from strengthening the nation’s preparedness for disasters.
“Are they going to even focus on preparedness?” Sutton said. “Or are they going to say, ‘Hands off, we’re done.’ I don’t know.”
