At 11:21 pm Monday night, officials in Ventura County sent a buzzing emergency alert to hundreds of thousands of residents warning of a fast-moving wildfire that had already torn through about 2,500 acres and was gaining speed.
However, about a dozen people say they never received the message and credited their safe escape to police officers screaming into loudspeakers outside their windows, to neighbors who sounded the alarm, or to seeing the fire alight the dark hills above their houses.
“A police siren blared outside and we had 45 minutes,” recalled Pat Erickson from the front steps of her rubble-reduced home. “I grabbed my purse, phone book, and flute, woke up Paul and we just got out.”
As another set of unruly, wind-fueled wildfires whips across California, forcing thousands from their homes and torching miles of land at a record pace, how and when officials chose to alert or evacuate residents is under scrutiny. Unlike officials in Northern California, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department decided to use a Wireless Emergency Alert system that sends a vibrating warning to all cell phones in a targeted area, similar to an Amber Alert.
The Thomas Fire, which started around 7 pm Monday, has raced across parched hillsides, quickly closing in on a growing number of neighborhoods. Alarmed by its speed, Ventura County’s Office of Emergency Services decided to blast the phones of about 850,000 people to jumpstart the evacuation process and notify people they should be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.
“The fire was like a freight train barreling down toward their homes at an insane pace,” Steve Kaufmann, a captain with the Ventura County Fire Department, explained. “We literally needed to get people out of their homes as soon as possible.”
Six hours after the fire started, it had torched 2,500 acres, Kaufmann said. By the morning, that number had jumped to 25,000. Although the wireless alert message was part of an array of methods officials used to clear out neighborhoods, it was the most far-reaching, pinging about half the county.
Although some residents said they did not receive the message, Kauffmann noted that by targeting such a sweeping part of the county, officials reduced the risk of even more residents enduring frantic, last-minute evacuations.
“One of the things we have noticed is that if we rely on one system, that fails,” Kaufmann continued. “People aren’t registered for some alerts. Cell towers go down. We used every single thing possible to get the word out so that every person who could be affected would hopefully get a warning in some way.”
So far, there have been no reported deaths or missing people, in stark contrast to the catastrophic fires that ravaged large parts of Northern California in October, killing 44 people and destroying nearly 9,000 structures. Afraid of deploying such an urgent alert to massive amounts of people, officials in Sonoma County, where 24 people died during the October fires, sent warnings through robocalls, social media, the Nixle system and SoCoAlert, which only a fraction of residents had signed up for before the fires.
“It was not a negligent decision. It seemed like the best, most appropriate response at that time,” Hannah Euser, spokeswoman for Sonoma County, explained at the time. “Half a million people would have gotten an emergency alert, many of them in areas not affected, and it could have been chaos.”
But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which launched the siren-like Wireless Emergency Alert system in 2012, refuted the claim that the alerts cannot be manipulated according to local needs. The agency told BuzzFeed News that “the alert originator has the option of providing geographic coordinates defining the area where the alert is to be targeted.”
On Wednesday, Los Angeles issued at least four specific geo-targeted alerts, including mandatory evacuation orders, to different areas as firefighters chased another fast-moving wildfire fast encroaching on hillside homes. The Los Angeles Fire Department also used the system to remind residents to check for “up-to-date information” on their website.
Months later, officials with the Sonoma County Fire and Emergency Services Department still contend they are reviewing the decision not to use the wireless alerts. On Nov. 30, in response to multiple BuzzFeed News requests for data on how and when residents were alerted, the department responded that the county is still “in the process of making some records” available online.
When asked if Northern California’s emergency notification issues influenced Ventura County’s decision to send the wide-reaching alert Monday, Kauffmann said that officials look at all past fires as learning experiences.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we say we don’t learn from other fires that happen,” he said. “I do think the faster you get the notice out and get people out and on the road then you don’t have people trying to leave when fire equipment is coming in. When firefighters aren’t using time and energy helping people getting into their cars and can focus on the fire leapfrogging from house to house they are able to save more lives.”
However, about a dozen evacuees in Ventura County said they never received a blaring message on their cell phones or that it came late, despite officials efforts to send it to as many people as possible.
Melissa Givner raced to save her horses after seeing an ominous orange glow climbing over the hill toward their suburbs and ranches. Ginger Moore said that she was informed that her apartment building was under mandatory evacuation via a text from a friend.
Kay and Al Berg decided to flee their now-destroyed house about an hour before the alert was deployed. Kay Berg said she found out she needed to leave after a live news alert on Facebook informed her the neighborhood was evacuating.
“We had about 45 minutes and the power was out so we were running in the dark with flashlights trying to figure out what we needed,” she said. “It wasn’t until we were backing out of the driveway that we saw police.”
