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I'm cutting this for c&p-ing some news articles behind paywalls. Nothing graphic described. Two medium-length articles explaining some of what went wrong and why, plus some highly dubious-sounding justifications from city officials. Plus commentary by me. Please chime in with thoughts or further info, if you've found any.
To be clear: I think some people probably would have died in Paradise even under perfect emergency management. That was a horrific fire that moved incredibly fast. But it should been a person or two who fell through the cracks the way people do - an isolated person who got missed, someone who ran back to fetch something, etc. It should not have been, as is looking likely, over a hundred.
***
From the LA Times:
When the Camp fire barreled toward this Sierra foothill town last Thursday morning, officials had a crucial choice to make right way: How much of Paradise should be evacuated?
The decision was complicated by history and topography. Paradise sits on a hilltop and is hemmed in by canyons, with only four narrow winding routes to flee to safety. During its last major fire in 2008, authorities evacuated so many people that roads became dangerously clogged.
So this time, they decided not to immediately undergo a full-scale evacuation, hoping to get residents out of neighborhoods closest to the fires first before the roads became gridlocked.
But it soon became clear that the fire was moving too fast for that plan, and that the whole town was in jeopardy. A full-scale evacuation order was issued at 9:17 a.m., but by then the fire was already consuming the town.
At least 56 people were killed — most of them in their homes, some trying to flee in their cars and others outside, desperately seeking shelter from the flames. More than 10,000 structures were lost in what is by far the worst wildfire in California history.
It’s unclear how much a different evacuation strategy would have changed the outcome of the fire, which was fueled by intense wind gusts of up to 52 mph and record dry vegetation in an area notoriously vulnerable to fires and wind-blown embers.
But the level of destruction and death is sure to make Paradise a grim lesson for agencies trying to improve emergency alerts and evacuations from fires as well as floods, mudslides and other natural disasters.
The death toll from natural disasters in California in the last year has been enormous, with nearly 40 killed in the wine country and Mendocino County fires and more than 20 in the Montecito mudslides. Officials acknowledged shortcomings in the efforts to get people out of harm’s way.
In the chaos of the Paradise fire, many residents said, they never got warnings by phone from authorities to leave. Some said they got warnings from police driving through their streets using loudspeakers. Others got texts from neighbors. But few said they got official text alerts or phone calls from the government.
The fire was first reported near the community of Pulga — about seven miles from Paradise — about 6:30 a.m. By 7:35 a.m., it had reached the nearby hamlet of Concow.
[Rachel note: The notably missing information here is when anyone should have realized that Paradise was in danger. I don't know the conditions (geography, wind, etc) enough to say whether, for instance, Paradise should have gotten a voluntary or mandatory evacuation alert at 6:30, or if there were legitimate reasons to believe it was not in danger at that point. I would like an objective assessment by a fire expert on when any alert at all should have been issued to Paradise, when/if it should have been voluntary, and when it should have been mandatory.]
The first evacuation order for Paradise came at 8 a.m., a minute after the first flames were spotted in town.
[Rachel note: WTF! There definitely should have been an evacuation alert - voluntary at least - well before the town actually caught fire, based on proximity and wind.]
The order was limited to the eastern side of Paradise. The hope was to get the residents closest to fire out immediately, with the rest of the town to follow if needed.
But the fire was simply moving too fast.
“The fire had already outrun us,” said John Messina, California Department of Fire and Forestry Protection battalion chief for Butte County.
The evacuation orders were sent using a phone system called CodeRed, which covers all landlines as well as cellphone numbers voluntarily submitted by residents. But the system doesn’t cover all phones in the town. “In the town of Paradise, I think we’d be lucky to say 25% or 30%” of phone lines are in the system — and that’s after local officials urge residents to sign up, said Jim Broshears, who directs Paradise’s emergency operations center.
[Rachel: This is why life-or-death alerts should not be opt-in or even voluntary.]
Also, the system can reach only so many phones per hour. “I can’t give you the raw numbers, but there’s a capacity per hour of calls. So CodeRed can’t [make] 12,000 calls at once. It’s really fast, but not this fast,” Broshears said.
[Rachel: Then maybe you should have a system that can cover the entire population. WTF!]
These types of systems have been criticized because they reach so few people. Instead, some safety experts have advocated using the federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alert system, which sends Amber Alert-style warnings to cellphones within a certain geographical area. But the system was not used during several California disasters, including the wine country fires and the heavy flooding that hit San Jose.
James Gore, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, said government is failing when officials don’t do a good job of communicating an incoming hazard.
“If people are already getting word on Facebook, and there’s nothing coming out of your government, then you’ve failed,” said Gore, whose county has begun to buy fire cameras that can sense the movement of blazes by heat and is seeking to purchase air sirens for parts of the county without cell coverage. “If you’re more worried about the crisis you could cause than the crisis that is upon you, then you have failed.”
In Paradise, Broshears said officials did not employ the Wireless Emergency Alert system because they initially wanted to stagger the evacuations by neighborhood.
[Rachel: This is not unreasonable given that there was essentially only one way out of the town. However, given that, then they should have started evacuating earlier so the last neighborhoods could still get out in time.]
He also said that Amber Alert-style alerts do “not go to every phone at the same time.”
According to the Federal Communications Commission, Wireless Emergency Alerts are broadcast to coverage areas that best approximate the zone of an emergency; mobile devices in the alert zone will receive the alert. There has been criticism that the geographical targeting of the system is not terribly precise, and in late 2019, wireless carriers are supposed to improve geo-targeting of the alerts.
During the recent test of the presidential alert distributed through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, the average delay in users’ receiving a text message was about 22 seconds.
Because of its vulnerability to fire, Paradise has debated the best evacuation strategy for years.
The idea of staggering evacuations was discussed in the wake of the 2008 fire that burned dozens of homes, county documents reviewed by The Times show. After the fire, some officials felt that residents were “over-evacuated” and that that needlessly clogged roads.
But the documents also show several instances in which county emergency officials warned that they might have to quickly evacuate the entire town.
Many Paradise residents said they were baffled by the lack of a warning.
“I assumed if something were to happen, there’d be an alert on your cellphone,” said Alexandria Wilson, 21. Neither she nor any of her 10 relatives now packed into a home in Applegate who all lost their homes in Paradise had ever heard of Butte County's CodeRed emergency alert program.
Only two of them received warnings and those were from a police officer driving down the road telling people to evacuate.
Instead, Wilson’s 10-year-old brother, Eden, was coordinating an evacuation effort. Savvy with a cellphone, he was texting and calling everyone and telling them to rendezvous at a Burger King in Chico.
“Nobody should have to get a call from a 10-year-old,” said Jacob Golden, Wilson's boyfriend.
***
***
From Fox40 (yes, I know, but this seems like decent reporting and it has some valuable info I didn't see elsewhere):
Brynn Parrott Chatfield saw the smoke rising above the pine trees near her home in Paradise, California. When she heard the trees blow up and saw the huge pieces of ash, she knew it was time to get out.
Chatfield hopped in her car and drove through fire and smoke to safety, a harrowing journey that she filmed from the driver’s seat.
“Heavenly Father, please help us. Please help us to be safe,” she pleaded in the video.
Though she managed to escape, she never did receive an emergency alert to her phone telling her to watch out for the oncoming fire.
Brad Weldon, also from Paradise, did get a phone alert. But he said it came as he was already fighting off the flames surrounding his home.
Their experiences reflect a widespread issue for residents in Paradise and surrounding Butte County: Many people did not receive emergency alert warnings, and some who did received them too late.
Instead, they learned of the danger not from authorities but through their own eyes and ears, or from concerned friends and family.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea defended the county’s use of the emergency alert system during the fire. He said the situation was “extraordinarily chaotic and rapidly moving” and so it took time for fire experts to get to the scene, determine the fire’s direction and warn the affected people — time they just didn’t have.
“There were notifications sent out, but as I said over and over again, this fire was moving so rapidly we couldn’t keep ahead of it,” Honea said.
[Rachel: If the fire is that fast and out of control, every town in the vicinity should at least be alerted.]
Paradise Mayor Jody Jones said landline phones are automatically enrolled in the county’s alert system, but cell phones have to be opted in to get the alerts. She said they have conducted drives to get people to register, but she wasn’t sure how many residents signed up.
“I got a phone call, I got texts on my cell phone. My husband got a phone call on the landline,” she told CNN. “So that’s the kind of notification people would get. If they went outside they could see what was happening also.”
[Rachel: 1) THE FUCK? 2) Paradise was largely a place people retired to. Disabled/sick/very elderly people are not going outside to scan the skies at 6:00 AM in case of fire! 3) If you can see your town is on fire just by going outside, it's already too late.]
The fire’s rapid spread through the town of Paradise and beyond left at least 56 people dead and destroyed thousands of homes and structures, making it the most destructive and deadliest blaze in state history.
On Wednesday, the Butte County sheriff published a list of more than a hundred people unaccounted for and still missing from the Camp Fire. The blaze, which has burned 140,000 acres, remains just 40% contained.
Honea said that, for now, Butte County would continue to focus on assisting CalFire on fighting the Camp Fire. Once the fire is contained, they will go back and look closer into the emergency alert system, he said.
“We’re getting a lot of requests and calls from people who want us to spend a lot of time going back and collecting data and there will be a time for that, but right now I need to focus on the fight in front of us,” Honea said.
As Honea noted, the speed of the fire took everyone by surprise and left residents of Paradise scrambling to escape in car and on foot.
The Camp Fire charred 20,000 acres last Thursday in less than 14 hours. Its most significant growth period was early Thursday afternoon, when it grew 10,000 acres in about 90 minutes — burning the equivalent of more than one football field every second during that time.
“We did our absolute best in terms of Amber-style alert, we used emergency mass notification system as well as our efforts to notify people when we’re in the communities. We employed that,” Honea said.
Honea offered several other explanations for why the alerts did not reach people in harm’s way.
He said the fire took place in a remote area where cell phone service may not be great. He also said that some people who received the warning may not have acted immediately to get out, and suggested that people may have been lulled into a false sense of security regarding fires.
“I don’t think it would be appropriate to draw the conclusion that because (bodies) were found in their house, you can automatically assume they were not notified,” he said. “It is possible that they were notified but they chose not to heed the warning and we have heard of stories like that.”
‘For the most part, our plan worked’
Mayor Jones said that the fire simply moved too quickly, especially compared to 2008’s devastating fire season.
“I mean, it just happened so fast. There wasn’t time to give anybody longer. In 2008, we had three hours between the first notice and the mandatory evacuation. We had three hours to pack up stuff,” she said.
This time, though? “We had no time at all. Maybe five minutes,” she added.
[Rachel: Right, so what was going on between the fire at Pulgas at 6:30 AM and when everyone had five minutes to run by 8:00 AM?]
About 26,000 people live in Paradise, some 85 miles north of Sacramento. Jones estimated that about 80 to 90% of the town was destroyed.
Still, despite the issue with the alert system, she defended the evacuation plan, calling it “organized chaos.”
“It did take time to get everybody through just because so many people were evacuated at the same time,” she said. “But I think for the most part, our plan worked. If we hadn’t had that plan, it would have been awful.”
Last October, officials in Northern California faced similar criticism from residents who said they learned of the fire by the smell of smoke or noise from their pets rather than from an emergency alert.
At the time, Kelly Huston, the deputy director for California’s Office of Emergency Service, said alerts and warnings happen on a local level, not a state level.
“They decide what are the appropriate alerts for their population,” Houston said.
[Rachel: That is a BAD system. I'm normally in favor of more local control but the current situation is demonstrating why we need a statewide system.
I'm currently leaning toward a combination of automatic, no opting out phone alerts, sirens, and a siren-like loudspeaker system like they have in Japan that can actually tell people what's going on and where to go. A lot of it could be pre-recorded for various eventualities, which would allow it to be broadcast in multiple languages. You could use a live person and google translate for in-the-moment specifics.)
***
To be clear: I think some people probably would have died in Paradise even under perfect emergency management. That was a horrific fire that moved incredibly fast. But it should been a person or two who fell through the cracks the way people do - an isolated person who got missed, someone who ran back to fetch something, etc. It should not have been, as is looking likely, over a hundred.
***
From the LA Times:
When the Camp fire barreled toward this Sierra foothill town last Thursday morning, officials had a crucial choice to make right way: How much of Paradise should be evacuated?
The decision was complicated by history and topography. Paradise sits on a hilltop and is hemmed in by canyons, with only four narrow winding routes to flee to safety. During its last major fire in 2008, authorities evacuated so many people that roads became dangerously clogged.
So this time, they decided not to immediately undergo a full-scale evacuation, hoping to get residents out of neighborhoods closest to the fires first before the roads became gridlocked.
But it soon became clear that the fire was moving too fast for that plan, and that the whole town was in jeopardy. A full-scale evacuation order was issued at 9:17 a.m., but by then the fire was already consuming the town.
At least 56 people were killed — most of them in their homes, some trying to flee in their cars and others outside, desperately seeking shelter from the flames. More than 10,000 structures were lost in what is by far the worst wildfire in California history.
It’s unclear how much a different evacuation strategy would have changed the outcome of the fire, which was fueled by intense wind gusts of up to 52 mph and record dry vegetation in an area notoriously vulnerable to fires and wind-blown embers.
But the level of destruction and death is sure to make Paradise a grim lesson for agencies trying to improve emergency alerts and evacuations from fires as well as floods, mudslides and other natural disasters.
The death toll from natural disasters in California in the last year has been enormous, with nearly 40 killed in the wine country and Mendocino County fires and more than 20 in the Montecito mudslides. Officials acknowledged shortcomings in the efforts to get people out of harm’s way.
In the chaos of the Paradise fire, many residents said, they never got warnings by phone from authorities to leave. Some said they got warnings from police driving through their streets using loudspeakers. Others got texts from neighbors. But few said they got official text alerts or phone calls from the government.
The fire was first reported near the community of Pulga — about seven miles from Paradise — about 6:30 a.m. By 7:35 a.m., it had reached the nearby hamlet of Concow.
[Rachel note: The notably missing information here is when anyone should have realized that Paradise was in danger. I don't know the conditions (geography, wind, etc) enough to say whether, for instance, Paradise should have gotten a voluntary or mandatory evacuation alert at 6:30, or if there were legitimate reasons to believe it was not in danger at that point. I would like an objective assessment by a fire expert on when any alert at all should have been issued to Paradise, when/if it should have been voluntary, and when it should have been mandatory.]
The first evacuation order for Paradise came at 8 a.m., a minute after the first flames were spotted in town.
[Rachel note: WTF! There definitely should have been an evacuation alert - voluntary at least - well before the town actually caught fire, based on proximity and wind.]
The order was limited to the eastern side of Paradise. The hope was to get the residents closest to fire out immediately, with the rest of the town to follow if needed.
But the fire was simply moving too fast.
“The fire had already outrun us,” said John Messina, California Department of Fire and Forestry Protection battalion chief for Butte County.
The evacuation orders were sent using a phone system called CodeRed, which covers all landlines as well as cellphone numbers voluntarily submitted by residents. But the system doesn’t cover all phones in the town. “In the town of Paradise, I think we’d be lucky to say 25% or 30%” of phone lines are in the system — and that’s after local officials urge residents to sign up, said Jim Broshears, who directs Paradise’s emergency operations center.
[Rachel: This is why life-or-death alerts should not be opt-in or even voluntary.]
Also, the system can reach only so many phones per hour. “I can’t give you the raw numbers, but there’s a capacity per hour of calls. So CodeRed can’t [make] 12,000 calls at once. It’s really fast, but not this fast,” Broshears said.
[Rachel: Then maybe you should have a system that can cover the entire population. WTF!]
These types of systems have been criticized because they reach so few people. Instead, some safety experts have advocated using the federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alert system, which sends Amber Alert-style warnings to cellphones within a certain geographical area. But the system was not used during several California disasters, including the wine country fires and the heavy flooding that hit San Jose.
James Gore, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, said government is failing when officials don’t do a good job of communicating an incoming hazard.
“If people are already getting word on Facebook, and there’s nothing coming out of your government, then you’ve failed,” said Gore, whose county has begun to buy fire cameras that can sense the movement of blazes by heat and is seeking to purchase air sirens for parts of the county without cell coverage. “If you’re more worried about the crisis you could cause than the crisis that is upon you, then you have failed.”
In Paradise, Broshears said officials did not employ the Wireless Emergency Alert system because they initially wanted to stagger the evacuations by neighborhood.
[Rachel: This is not unreasonable given that there was essentially only one way out of the town. However, given that, then they should have started evacuating earlier so the last neighborhoods could still get out in time.]
He also said that Amber Alert-style alerts do “not go to every phone at the same time.”
According to the Federal Communications Commission, Wireless Emergency Alerts are broadcast to coverage areas that best approximate the zone of an emergency; mobile devices in the alert zone will receive the alert. There has been criticism that the geographical targeting of the system is not terribly precise, and in late 2019, wireless carriers are supposed to improve geo-targeting of the alerts.
During the recent test of the presidential alert distributed through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, the average delay in users’ receiving a text message was about 22 seconds.
Because of its vulnerability to fire, Paradise has debated the best evacuation strategy for years.
The idea of staggering evacuations was discussed in the wake of the 2008 fire that burned dozens of homes, county documents reviewed by The Times show. After the fire, some officials felt that residents were “over-evacuated” and that that needlessly clogged roads.
But the documents also show several instances in which county emergency officials warned that they might have to quickly evacuate the entire town.
Many Paradise residents said they were baffled by the lack of a warning.
“I assumed if something were to happen, there’d be an alert on your cellphone,” said Alexandria Wilson, 21. Neither she nor any of her 10 relatives now packed into a home in Applegate who all lost their homes in Paradise had ever heard of Butte County's CodeRed emergency alert program.
Only two of them received warnings and those were from a police officer driving down the road telling people to evacuate.
Instead, Wilson’s 10-year-old brother, Eden, was coordinating an evacuation effort. Savvy with a cellphone, he was texting and calling everyone and telling them to rendezvous at a Burger King in Chico.
“Nobody should have to get a call from a 10-year-old,” said Jacob Golden, Wilson's boyfriend.
***
***
From Fox40 (yes, I know, but this seems like decent reporting and it has some valuable info I didn't see elsewhere):
Brynn Parrott Chatfield saw the smoke rising above the pine trees near her home in Paradise, California. When she heard the trees blow up and saw the huge pieces of ash, she knew it was time to get out.
Chatfield hopped in her car and drove through fire and smoke to safety, a harrowing journey that she filmed from the driver’s seat.
“Heavenly Father, please help us. Please help us to be safe,” she pleaded in the video.
Though she managed to escape, she never did receive an emergency alert to her phone telling her to watch out for the oncoming fire.
Brad Weldon, also from Paradise, did get a phone alert. But he said it came as he was already fighting off the flames surrounding his home.
Their experiences reflect a widespread issue for residents in Paradise and surrounding Butte County: Many people did not receive emergency alert warnings, and some who did received them too late.
Instead, they learned of the danger not from authorities but through their own eyes and ears, or from concerned friends and family.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea defended the county’s use of the emergency alert system during the fire. He said the situation was “extraordinarily chaotic and rapidly moving” and so it took time for fire experts to get to the scene, determine the fire’s direction and warn the affected people — time they just didn’t have.
“There were notifications sent out, but as I said over and over again, this fire was moving so rapidly we couldn’t keep ahead of it,” Honea said.
[Rachel: If the fire is that fast and out of control, every town in the vicinity should at least be alerted.]
Paradise Mayor Jody Jones said landline phones are automatically enrolled in the county’s alert system, but cell phones have to be opted in to get the alerts. She said they have conducted drives to get people to register, but she wasn’t sure how many residents signed up.
“I got a phone call, I got texts on my cell phone. My husband got a phone call on the landline,” she told CNN. “So that’s the kind of notification people would get. If they went outside they could see what was happening also.”
[Rachel: 1) THE FUCK? 2) Paradise was largely a place people retired to. Disabled/sick/very elderly people are not going outside to scan the skies at 6:00 AM in case of fire! 3) If you can see your town is on fire just by going outside, it's already too late.]
The fire’s rapid spread through the town of Paradise and beyond left at least 56 people dead and destroyed thousands of homes and structures, making it the most destructive and deadliest blaze in state history.
On Wednesday, the Butte County sheriff published a list of more than a hundred people unaccounted for and still missing from the Camp Fire. The blaze, which has burned 140,000 acres, remains just 40% contained.
Honea said that, for now, Butte County would continue to focus on assisting CalFire on fighting the Camp Fire. Once the fire is contained, they will go back and look closer into the emergency alert system, he said.
“We’re getting a lot of requests and calls from people who want us to spend a lot of time going back and collecting data and there will be a time for that, but right now I need to focus on the fight in front of us,” Honea said.
As Honea noted, the speed of the fire took everyone by surprise and left residents of Paradise scrambling to escape in car and on foot.
The Camp Fire charred 20,000 acres last Thursday in less than 14 hours. Its most significant growth period was early Thursday afternoon, when it grew 10,000 acres in about 90 minutes — burning the equivalent of more than one football field every second during that time.
“We did our absolute best in terms of Amber-style alert, we used emergency mass notification system as well as our efforts to notify people when we’re in the communities. We employed that,” Honea said.
Honea offered several other explanations for why the alerts did not reach people in harm’s way.
He said the fire took place in a remote area where cell phone service may not be great. He also said that some people who received the warning may not have acted immediately to get out, and suggested that people may have been lulled into a false sense of security regarding fires.
“I don’t think it would be appropriate to draw the conclusion that because (bodies) were found in their house, you can automatically assume they were not notified,” he said. “It is possible that they were notified but they chose not to heed the warning and we have heard of stories like that.”
‘For the most part, our plan worked’
Mayor Jones said that the fire simply moved too quickly, especially compared to 2008’s devastating fire season.
“I mean, it just happened so fast. There wasn’t time to give anybody longer. In 2008, we had three hours between the first notice and the mandatory evacuation. We had three hours to pack up stuff,” she said.
This time, though? “We had no time at all. Maybe five minutes,” she added.
[Rachel: Right, so what was going on between the fire at Pulgas at 6:30 AM and when everyone had five minutes to run by 8:00 AM?]
About 26,000 people live in Paradise, some 85 miles north of Sacramento. Jones estimated that about 80 to 90% of the town was destroyed.
Still, despite the issue with the alert system, she defended the evacuation plan, calling it “organized chaos.”
“It did take time to get everybody through just because so many people were evacuated at the same time,” she said. “But I think for the most part, our plan worked. If we hadn’t had that plan, it would have been awful.”
Last October, officials in Northern California faced similar criticism from residents who said they learned of the fire by the smell of smoke or noise from their pets rather than from an emergency alert.
At the time, Kelly Huston, the deputy director for California’s Office of Emergency Service, said alerts and warnings happen on a local level, not a state level.
“They decide what are the appropriate alerts for their population,” Houston said.
[Rachel: That is a BAD system. I'm normally in favor of more local control but the current situation is demonstrating why we need a statewide system.
I'm currently leaning toward a combination of automatic, no opting out phone alerts, sirens, and a siren-like loudspeaker system like they have in Japan that can actually tell people what's going on and where to go. A lot of it could be pre-recorded for various eventualities, which would allow it to be broadcast in multiple languages. You could use a live person and google translate for in-the-moment specifics.)
***
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You can get alerts on your cellphone, too.
P.
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I think you can get commercial and weather radio on a cellphone, though you probably need an app and finding one in the middle of a severe weather situation is less than ideal.
P.