Here’s an informative story about an underutilized tool in the emergency response arsenal.
In the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died.
A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas.
“There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded.
Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region.
Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died.
The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over.
The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it.
ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.
Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance.
In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them.
Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.”
Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds.
“There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.”
[…]
The biggest hurdle to accessing IPAWS isn’t training or testing. It is money. Local governments must pay a third-party vendor for software that can interface with IPAWS — an expense of potentially tens of thousands of dollars that rural and lower-income counties struggle to afford.
A study released in July by a team at Argonne National Laboratory found that 82% of local emergency managers cited a lack of funding as their main barrier to adopting more technology. More than half cited a lack of expertise or training.
In late 2019, Congress required FEMA to create a training and recertification process that IPAWS users would have to complete each year, but that remains in the works. Although FEMA was pursuing a contract to create the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, did not approve the funding for it, a FEMA spokesperson said.
Despite this, FEMA “continues to lean forward to launch” the program, the spokesperson said in an email.
Using IPAWS also can be daunting. Some of the software systems that local governments purchase to interface with it are confusing and require practice, Sutton said. With a disaster looming or upon them, officials face a blank white text box. They must write the alert, code it correctly and get whatever permissions their policies require.
In the back of an emergency manager’s mind is that nagging question: What if I send out this alert and the threat turns out to be a big dud? “Then they’re going to get a lot of people who are really mad,” Sutton said.
Sending alerts also doesn’t always go perfectly. In 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message said, before being corrected 38 minutes later. The employee who sent it was later fired, although his attorney argued he was made a scapegoat.
Other times, software and other technical problems play a role. In January, a wildfire evacuation order sent to cellphones over IPAWS was intended for a specific area in Los Angeles County but instead blasted to all of its 10 million residents. The error stemmed from location data failing to save properly in the IPAWS system, likely due to its software vendor’s technical glitch, according to a recent congressional report.
A few months earlier, in September, an emergency manager in North Carolina hesitated to send IPAWS alerts as Hurricane Helene closed in on his county because a past experience had left him reluctant to try again.
Jeff Howell was the emergency manager in Yancey County, a rural expanse of mountainous beauty that Helene would soon decimate. A few years earlier, when he’d sent an IPAWS alert, the message blasted to cellphones in a neighboring county and to Johnson City, Tennessee. He fielded an angry phone call from a counterpart displeased that residents in his county had received it.
Howell, who has since retired, said was told the area’s mountainous topography played a role in the message casting too far. He didn’t want that to happen with Helene approaching.
Although the weather service warned almost 24 hours before Helene’s devastating floodwaters hit that the storm would be among the region’s worst weather events “in the modern era,” Yancey County sent no IPAWS alerts giving warnings or directions to people living along its rivers and creeks, which ferry water down steep mountains. In the end, 11 people died there, more per capita than in any other county.
In hindsight, Howell said he wished he’d tried harder to send an IPAWS alert before the unprecedented flash flooding and deadly landslides tore down the mountains. But he’d often fielded complaints from residents who told him they turned off weather notifications because they got so many of them.
The story covers the Kerrville floods and the many issues there. I don’t recall seeing IPAWS mentioned in the many stories I read and blogged about during this time – I’m sure there were some references, but nothing that I recall highlighting it – and as far as I know it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the bills that were passed or the bills that weren’t passed during the second special session. Maybe cost was a factor, maybe mistrust of the feds in general and FEMA in particular was a factor – to be fair, at this present moment, that is not an irrational response – maybe it just wasn’t the top priority, I don’t know. The concerns about alerting the wrong people or sending a false alarm are real, too, though there are ways to deal with them. There is a movement in Congress to pass a bill to address some of these shortcomings, which is more necessary than ever in this day of bigger and more frequent disasters. We should be using the tools that are available to us, and to make them as effective as they can be.