Special Report: Some emergency alert systems failed during wildfire
A new report issued by Yolo County's Office of Emergency Services revealed a flawed system that failed to deliver timely evacuation notices when the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire came to town.
(Image: Fire burns vegetation along Highway 128 near the town of Winters on August 18, 2020. Photo by the author.)
An analysis of emergency notifications sent to residents of rural Yolo County during last month’s LNU Lightning Complex wildfire revealed residents did not receive evacuation notices by phone or text message because phone systems incorrectly perceived the alerts to be robocalls, according to a report issued by the county’s Office of Emergency Services.
The report, obtained this weekend by LNU Solano, revealed 100 percent of reverse 9-1-1 type phone calls were not received by county residents when the wildfire crossed from Napa County into rural Yolo and Solano counties from August 17 to August 18.
The report was created by Yolo County officials after receiving feedback from residents of rural Winters that emergency evacuation notices were never received. Some residents said they self-evacuated after witnessing the fire for themselves; others said they were notified by early-morning knocks on the door by neighbors and emergency personnel.
Days after the fire, former Winters Express newspaper editor Debra DeAngelo posted a message to Facebook asking residents within the fire’s perimeter to offer feedback on whether or not they received emergency messages. Most of the residents who commented said they received no warning.
A review of Yolo County’s emergency notification system, Yolo Alert, found a series of mistakes and other incidents were to blame for residents not receiving emergency alerts.
Nearly two-thirds of all notifications sent by telephone and text message were not received by residents who signed up for Yolo Alert, which is connected to Yolo County’s Operational Area Mass Notification system, the report said. Of those notifications, 100 percent of voice calls and 14 percent of text messages were not delivered to residents who had signed up for Yolo Alert.
(Graphic: Yolo County Office of Emergency Services)
County officials said a combination of factors were likely to blame, including “downstream communication errors” which may have been caused by cell phone towers that were knocked offline and utility poles that were burned by the fire.
But county officials focused heavily on anti-robocall measures that have been adopted by landline and mobile phone companies in recent years thanks to the passage of state and federal consumer protection laws. Before 2019, Yolo County sent alerts using a phone number that displayed all 9s on Caller ID systems so residents and businesses would know the alerts were coming from Yolo County. The county changed its number to one with an 833 prefix in late 2019 after Gov. Newsom signed SB 208 into law, which required telephone companies to use advanced algorithms to detect and block robocalls.
The 833 number was adopted to prevent issues with services that block robocalls, officials said. But Yolo County officials used pre-programmed evacuation notice templates the night of the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire — templates that were programmed with the old number.
The end result, officials said, was that calls that were sent warning of the wildfire and ordering residents to evacuate likely weren’t received because landline phones and cell phones confused them with robocalls.
“All of these factors lead to an initial hypothesis that the use of the previous caller ID coupled with the new robocall control infrastructure present in today’s telecom system [meant] Yolo County’s voice mass notification calls ended up not being delivered to the end users while most data communication systems did succeed,” county officials wrote in the report, adding that other errors like mis-typed phone numbers may have also contributed to the issue but weren’t individually evaluated in the report.
Yolo County divides its jurisdiction into more than 90 evacuation zones, which also serves as the county’s delineation points for issuing emergency notifications. Rural portions of Winters outside of the incorporated city lay within Zone 58 and Zone 60, while most of the city itself encompasses Zone 59.
When the LNU Lightning Complex wildfire triggered a mandatory evacuation order for rural Winters, around 60 percent of evacuation notices sent by phone and text message weren’t delivered to people who signed up for Yolo Alert, the report said. The county could only confirm that 18 percent of notices were actually delivered to the handsets of residents who opted-in to receive them.
In Solano County, evacuation notices were issued through Alert Solano, a similar system used by Solano County’s Office of Emergency Services. That system apparently worked as intended, according to officials with knowledge of the matter, though they say some residents likely didn’t receive alerts because they were signed up for Nixle, a commercial system used by a handful of individual agencies.
A few days after the wildfire crossed into Solano County, the Solano County Sheriff’s Department posted a video to Facebook urging residents to sign up for Alert Solano, saying county-level evacuation notices are issued through that system and not through localized Nixle accounts.
“The reason we use Alert Solano for evacuation or alert notifications is because…we can go directly to the ZIP code and drill right in on the folks who need to evacuate,” Solano County Sheriff Thomas Ferrara said. “The concern if we use Nixle is we’re putting it out county-wide or world-wide and it could lead to mass evacuations.”
A mass evacuation would likely create roadway congestion and hamper emergency services and others who are responding to the front lines of the wildfire, Ferrara said. That scenario is something Alert Solano is designed to prevent.
Residents can sign up for Alert Solano’s email, text message and phone calls notifications for free at Solano County’s website here.
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LNU Solano is not affiliated with Solano County or any public safety agency. During times of crisis, always follow the direction of law enforcement and other public safety officials. Plan ahead for wildfires at www.readyforwildfire.org.