U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia released his report Monday after investigating a false emergency warning in Los Angeles County during a fatal January wildfire.
The investigation was launched by more than 12 members of the LA council delegation in February after LA County sent a series of evacuation warnings on January 9th, and by more than 12 members of the LA council delegation in February after urging 10 million metropolitan areas to prepare for evacuation. The breakdown alert came two days after a severe fire in Pallisad and Altadena in the Pacific Ocean.
The alert, intended for a small group of residents near Calabasas, caused panic and confusion as the community repeatedly exploded 40 miles from the evacuation area.
In “The Alarms Sound: Lessons from Kenneth Fire Alerts,” Garcia’s office reports that the software company contracted with the county to issue a wireless emergency warning, confirming that the technical error caused the false alert to ping through a vast metro area.
It also found that, contrary to the accounts of LA County officials at the time, multiple echo alerts were generated as mobile phone providers experienced overload due to the massive and lengthy period of alerts. The vague language of LA County’s original warnings exacerbated the confusion, the report said.
“It’s clear that there’s still a lot of reforms needed, so it’s clear that there’s an operating system that people can rely on in the future and trustworthy,” Garcia told The Times.
The Times contacted Gennasy and LA County officials to respond to the report.
Garcia said she is a Long Beach Democrat who will be on the U.S. House Committee and the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform.
“We’re talking about the loss of life and property and the trust that people have in the emergency notification system,” he said. “If there is a natural disaster, you need to be able to get an alert and trust that it has the correct information.
To improve the emergency warning warning system, the report urges Congress and the federal government to “bundle the gap between system performance, certification and public communication warnings.”
“Lessons from Kenneth’s fires will not only inform reforms, but also serve as a catalyst for modernizing the country’s warning infrastructure before the next disaster occurs.”
The report makes some recommendations. More federal funding is needed for planning, equipment, training and system maintenance for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s integrated public warning and warning systems. This is a national system that uses radio emergency alerts, and provides general emergency alerts via mobile phones using radio and television.
It also urges HEMA to fully complete the minimum requirements and improve IPAWS training, which was mandated by Congress in 2019, after the Hawaiian Emergency Management Agency sent false warnings for missile attacks coming into millions of residents and vacationers. Five years after Congress called for the standardization, functionality and interoperability of incident management and warning tools, FEMA has yet to complete implementation of certification programs for users and third-party software providers, the report says. Agents are scheduled to pilot third-party technology certification programs this year.
The report also establishes performance standards with the Federal Communications Commission, develops measurable targets and WEA performance monitoring, and ensures that mobile providers include location awareness maps by the December 2026 deadline.
But calling for greater surveillance is certainly a challenge when President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Christa Noem are pushing for FEMA to be demolished.
Over the past few days, the Trump administration fired Fema acting chief Cameron Hamilton after telling us that lawmakers did not support the removal of agencies. Noem told members of Congress at last week’s hearing that Trump “believes that the agency has failed the people of America, and the FEMA that exists today should be eliminated by empowering the nation to respond to federally supported disasters.”
Garcia described the Trump administration’s dismantling of FEMA as “very concerned.”
“We need to have a stable FEMA leadership,” Garcia told The Times. “I hope that the recent reconstructions and changes that are happening will not actually get in the way of making these systems stronger. We need stability in FEMA. FEMA needs to continue to exist. …The sooner we get investments, the sooner we complete these studies, the safer we think.”
Garcia said his office is working to draft laws that could address some of these issues.
“We really need to promote FEMA, we need to promote government, and Congress is absolutely playing a role in ensuring that these systems are stronger,” Garcia said. “It’s important to fully fund these systems. …There are dozens of these systems, but there are no modern, true centralized rules.”
More than 40 different commercial providers work in the emergency warning market, according to FEMA. However, he said further steps need to be taken to train local emergency managers and regulate private software companies and wireless providers who play a pivotal role in protecting millions of Americans during tough wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and active shooter incidents.
“Continuous efforts are needed to improve the provision of wireless emergency alerts to increase training with warning authorities, strengthen standardization with service providers, and increase further collaboration with wireless providers,” said Thomas Breslin, deputy administrator at the FEMA’s National Continuity Program office, in a letter to Garcia.
San Diego-based Genasys said in a recent SEC filing that “alert coverage has expanded to cities and counties in 39 states.” The “majority of California” is being targeted by the EVAC system, saying it has grown into the eastern US and has expanded to Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Genasys also said its alerting system is an “interactive cloud-based” software service, increasing the chances of communication disruption. “The information technology systems used by us and our vendors are vulnerable to service interruptions, system malfunctions, natural disasters, terrorism, war, outages, breakdowns, or other damage or interruptions due to telecommunications and electrical failures,” the SEC filed.
Garcia received responses from Genasys, LA County, FEMA and FCC as part of an investigation into how evacuation warnings were misdirected to nearly 10 million LA County residents during LA Fires.
The report said La County Emergency Management Worker correctly saved alerts with narrowly defined polygons in areas near Kenneth Fire. However, the software did not upload the correct evacuation area polygons to IPAWS, possibly due to network destruction, the report says. The Genasys system also did not warn LA County emergency management staff that they drafted an alert that the target polygon was missing in the IPAWS channel before sending a message, the report found.
Genasys has since added a safeguard to its software, but the report noted that Genasys did not explain in detail how the error occurred. An independent action review of Eton and Palisade’s fire response suggested that it would “follow further investigation of the claims that it could be a cause of errors and how network disruption occurred or that it could have blocked proper uploads of polygons to the IPAWS distribution channel.”
The report praised LA County for cancelling the alert within 2 minutes and 47 seconds, issued a revised message after about 20 minutes, stating that the alert was sent “incorrectly” by the time it responded.
But it also criticized the county’s original alert’s language as ambiguous. He said that some degree of confusion could have been avoided if the emergency management staff who wrote the alert had more geographical specificity and described areas containing timestamps.
The report also found that it was not caused by a series of false echo alerts coming out over the next few days by the mobile tower coming back online after being knocked down due to a fire, as reported by LA County emergency management officials. Instead, they were caused by technical issues with cell phone networks.
One mobile carrier believed that duplicate alerts were attributable to the consequences of overload due to the large amounts and length of alerts sent during the fire. The report said the company has installed temporary patches and is developing permanent repairs, but it is unclear whether other networks have become possible to ensure that other networks do not face similar issues.
The report did not dig into the significant delays in electronic emergency alerts sent to the Altadena area. When flames erupted from Eton Canyon on January 7th, the neighborhood on the east side of Altadena received an evacuation order at 7:26pm, while residents in the west did not receive an order until 3:25am after the fire began destroying the neighborhood. Of the 18 people, 17 were confirmed to be on the west, as they were killed in the Eton fire.
Garcia told the Times that the Altadena problem appears to be due to human error, not technical errors in the emergency alert software. Garcia said he and other LA Congress members were eager to read the post-action review of McCrystal Group on Eaton and Palisades’ response to the fire.
Garcia said local, state and federal officials all share some responsibility for the issue of the LA fire alert. From now on, he said Congress should encourage the federal government to develop a reliable regulatory system for alerts.
“If you have so many operators and these IPAWS requirements aren’t in place, that’s a concern,” Garcia said. “There should be federal standards. That’s obvious.”
Garcia told the Times that emergency warnings were not just a matter of Southern California.
“These systems are in use nationwide,” he said. “This can affect any community. So it’s in the best interest of everyone to work with FEMA and work with the FCC to ensure these adjustments and changes. I think this is very important.”
Times staff writer Page St. John contributed to this report.
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