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A spark from the malfunctioning transmission line ignited the flame. Eventually, the Gale Force winds fired into a powerful firestorm that tore through the Hills of Sierra Nevada at the speed of one soccer field.
By November 8, 2018, most residents had not been ordered to evacuate when embers began to rain in the paradise town. Seven miles away.
Many people fled before getting official evacuation warnings or alerts. The roads of paradise shook as thick smoke and orange sparks filled the air. Hundreds abandoned their cars and tried to overtake the fire on foot.
In the end, 85 people were killed, making the camp fire a fatal wildfire in California history.
Six years later, how Northern California communities responded to a failed evacuation will provide lessons in Los Angeles County. There, a wireless evacuation warning reached Western Altadena nine hours after the Eton fire. A Times investigation in January found out that of the 17 confirmed deaths, all occurred in the West.
As Butte County Sheriff, Corey L. Honney was responsible for evacuating people safely. He was heavily criticized for not acting early to warn residents.
“There were no evacuation orders at all,” Lee Bailey, a resident of Magalia, just north of Paradise, told The Times in 2018.
Less than a quarter of Paradise’s 27,000 residents received an official evacuation order via telephone. The 2020 late report shows that only one trained staff manage alerts during the first 16 hours of the fire, and the county struggles with the latest wireless emergency alert technology, and new in the worst-case scenario The system was not tested thoroughly.
Honea then overhauled the county’s warning system. In an interview with the Times, Honair explained the lessons he learned from the camp fires and offered advice to Los Angeles officials after the Pallisard and Eton fires killed 29 people.
“When you see these things happen, you get a sense of PTSD,” Honea said he is watching news reports of Palisade and Altadena’s failed evacuation.
“The task of warning people of threats and providing information is a very complicated process,” Honair said. “Unfortunately, many citizens don’t realize how complicated it is, and I don’t think a lot of government agencies are really prepared about that.”
The outline of Mobile Homes remains at Ridgewood Mobile Home Park in Paradise, California, after the 2018 camp fire.
(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)
Evacuation early
Most people think wildfires are moving in a linear fashion in a fast-fire-head-consuming community. But Honea said the camp fires taught him that strong winds could blow fires and fly over the community, carrying embers burning to areas more than a mile away.
On the morning of November 8th, the fire chief called on the radio at 7:46am to evacuate the east side of Paradise. .
Now Honea said he has a tendency to issue alerts earlier.
“The ideal is to warn them before the embers actually start to fall,” he said.
Honea is not just a local California official who is slow to alert residents with large wireless alerts. When the 2017 Tubbs fire swept through Northern California’s wine country, officials from Sonoma and Napa counties decided not to send massive wireless alerts for fear of causing gridlocks and panic throughout the county. Ta. 22 people have passed away.
These practices, and subsequent loss of life, led the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services to establish statewide warning and warning guidelines in 2019. They urge local officials to issue alerts and warnings if there is an “immediate threat to their lives, health or property.” Even if the threat is not imminent, the guidelines recommend that warnings help to “communicate the threat to the public and prepare you better.”
“The fear of causing ‘panic’ is not a valid reason to delay or avoid warnings,” the guidelines state. “‘Loss of panic’ is very rare as a result of warning messages. ”
Honea said that considering how quickly the area will be alerted, they are focusing on population density, road infrastructure and topography. Paradise is a town built on a volcanic ridge with a labyrinth of dead roads, and was especially difficult to evacuate.
Butte County is also taking steps to maintain and update a list of vulnerable residents (people with mobility issues and noisy people), so emergency workers notify them before a disaster You can try and arrange transportation.
Paradise Elementary School after the 2018 camp fire.
(Gina Ferazzi /Los Angeles Times)
Create a team with well-defined roles
Before the camp fire, Butte County relied on dispatch centers to push alerts. But the small county team was quickly overwhelmed, Honea said. They answered 911 calls and tried to create and push messages in a timely manner, talking to the unit responding via radio.
A 2020 post-action report on camp fires found five people in the county trained to operate a mass alert system, but one person was hit by the fire on November 8th. , the other person was on vacation when he evacuated his family. That led to two dispatchers answering calls during the first two hours of fire, with one staff creating and sending dozens of mass alerts throughout the county.
After the camp fire, Honea created another alert and warning team. 25 people – Volunteers from the search and rescue team and non-student civilian staff are trained to push alerts.
Messages across multiple platforms
For Honea, the most effective way to encourage people to evacuate is for a unified law enforcement officer to go to the neighborhood and knock on the door touring door. However, in a fast disaster, there is not enough time.
“Literally, certain areas may not have enough law enforcement officers or firefighters,” Honair said. “I think that was obviously what happened in the Palisade and Eaton fire situation.”
In an age where most people are glued to their phones, wireless mobile alerts can be an important way to spread the news quickly, says Honea. However, such technologies can also be vulnerable when cell towers come out or when there are software errors.
“There is no warranty or a complete system,” Honair said. “But what we want is that for our team, we are in a better position to make sure that all areas that need to be warned or evacuated are actually warned or evacuated. That’s what we’re going.”
Some of Butte County’s warning and alert teams send notifications via Facebook, X and Instagram, while others send notifications via news releases and communications with traditional media partners. Alerts are sent via the coded emergency mass notification system and IPAWS. This is the national system of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for local alerts to expose wireless emergency alerts to the public via mobile phones and sending information via radio and television using the emergency alert system .
Additionally, Honea said someone is managing the infield response of deputies knocking on the door.
How Jarbo Gap Winds fueled the fires of camps that destroyed much of California Paradise.
(John Schreus/Los Angeles Times)
Train and practice regularly
After the camp fire, investigators discovered that Butte County had not fully tested its mass notification system to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
After switching to a new, large notification software system in 2017, the county didn’t devote enough time to practice using it, the 2020 Action Report discovered. When the fire broke out on November 8, 2018, the coded system integration that allowed officials to send IPAWS alerts failed, but staff did not recognize it until the next day.
Now, Honea will see his alerts and warning teams meet monthly to conduct mock training, ask themselves which zones to issue evacuation orders, and practice adjusting pre-written messages to certain areas. It also rehearses access to various platforms and ensures that your social media and IPAWS account logins are working.
“They do everything they need to do other than actually pressing the final send button,” Honea said.
Officials are constantly learning
Even after the camp fire, Butte County did not necessarily send a lot of alerts quickly.
In 2020, county officials were once again criticised for issuing late evacuation warnings and orders during a fire at a north complex.
But since then, according to Honea, the latest latest test of his ability to respond to major fires was a July 2024 park fire that caught fire at Bidwell Park in Chico.
Honea decides to evacuate the small mountain town of Kohasset, despite the fire still miles away.
Within about an hour, the county issued its first warning, Honea said. An evacuation order was then issued. As the fire progressed, authorities updated their orders and warnings.
The fire cleaned up the Kohasset and destroyed dozens of structures. But no one died.
“As a sheriff responsible for evacuating alerts and warnings, that’s my main goal,” Honair said. “We were able to kick everyone out.”
Still, Honea considers the risk of excessive vigilance. If people don’t see the threat, he said, they immediately start pushing back to open it.
“You warn people, warn them, warn them, warn them, warn them, warn them, warn them, warn them, because you’re not trying to make people stop paying attention to you There is this constant dynamic that must be done to assess risks.”
After the 2018 camp fire, burnt mail boxes remain along Penns Road in Paradise, California.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
The public should play a more active role
Honea said some people don’t listen to warnings, regardless of the number of platforms executives use to send alerts.
However, after the camp fire, Honea said that many residents were used to the threat of a deadly fire and took preparatory measures, making it easier for him to issue evacuations.
“They tend to listen to us,” he said.
Honea said he wasn’t convinced that residents of densely populated subway areas such as Los Angeles had heard official calls to evacuate hours or a day before Pallisard or Eaton fired. I did. They may have assumed that the possibility of a fire spreading across the city was far away.
“If you’ve never experienced it, it’s really hard to imagine what it would be like to go through it,” Honair said. “Now people understand. If a fire occurs in a populated area with all these buildings and structures, it can really take off.”
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