On the afternoon of January 9, nearly 10 million people in Los Angeles County received danger warnings.
"New: This is an emergency message from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. An evacuation warning has been issued for your area," the alert begins, going on to list recommended actions and resources.
The news reached people who were already on edge. It's the third day of dry, windy red flag weather conditions that are fueling the spread of wildfires across the county. Two of the largest and most destructive fires, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, have caused more than 180,000 people to flee their homes and destroyed thousands of structures, and both fires are still burning.
A correction was issued about 20 minutes later, clarifying that the warning was only for people in the area around the Kenneth Fire, one of the new fires threatening communities near West Hills. But for many, the false evacuation alerts continued, with their phones ringing through the night and into the next day.
"People are extremely frustrated, angry and fearful about this misinformation," Kevin McGowan, director of the Los Angeles Office of Emergency Management (OEM), said at a press conference the next morning. He promised it was a It's an "all hands on deck" situation and his office is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to identify and resolve the issue. Meanwhile, McGowan said Los Angeles County will use the state's system to send alerts and tell residents to cross-check any evacuation messages with the county's maps.
For many in Los Angeles, evacuation warnings to residents to prepare to evacuate before formal evacuation orders were issued in the area, meaning the threat was imminent, provided them with a life-saving chance to escape the fast-moving fires . But false alarms and delayed responses, as well as repeated false warnings, open the door to uncertainty and even harm if recipients try to evacuate en masse, and block the roads those who actually need to escape danger. The errors also threatened the integrity of these alert systems, with the county admitting in a statement that the errors were a "serious breach of public trust" and experts questioning how many people might have opted out of alerts as a result.
A week later, authorities are still investigating issues with the Los Angeles County alert. What we know so far suggests there are multiple points of failure in this complex system, including an issue that experts say they've been raising concerns for years.
Solve the problem
At a press conference on January 10, McGowan said the false alarm was a technical issue, not human error. "No one is sitting at a desk activating emergency alarms right now," he said.
Identifying issues with the alert process can be complex because the system itself is layered. While emergency alerts often resemble text messages, they actually originate from unique partnerships between government offices and agencies with wireless providers and private companies. Los Angeles County uses a third-party software system called Genasys to enter alerts, which are then sent through FEMA's Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, known as IPAWS. From there, the message is distributed as a wireless emergency alert, which most major cell phone providers in the United States carry as a courtesy. What the alert actually looks like when it gets to you depends on more variables, like your phone's model and age.
A FEMA spokesperson said rolling stones The agency is working with state, county and other local security offices in Los Angeles as well as wireless carriers and the Federal Communications Commission to resolve the issue. Zach Stanley, a consultant with Bent Ear Solutions LLC and a former Oklahoma emergency manager, said the technical issues they've found so far fall into three categories: residents receiving alerts after they expire or are canceled, multiple collections, to alert time, and alerts received outside the intended target area.
Going down the list, the first problem is one that FEMA has encountered before in other incidents involving power outages. When emergency alert agencies enter a message into the system, they choose how long the message remains active. This doesn't mean you should receive the message multiple times, but it does allow new entrants into the danger zone to receive the message when they enter the expected warning range.
While the length of time an alert lasts varies depending on the threat, Stanford told me, "I have never known a wireless emergency alert to be effective for less than 15 minutes and never to be effective for more than 24 hours." But according to FEMA , if the wireless infrastructure goes offline during a scheduled alert, then set messages may disappear when those sources come back on, even though they are technically canceled within the system.
The second issue - duplicate alerts, or "echoes" as the Los Angeles County OEM keeps referring to them - also points to issues with cell phone carriers.
"Our initial assessment is that these recurring false notifications are due to telecommunications system issues, most likely due to the impact of fires on cell towers," the Los Angeles OEM explained in a statement on January 10. FCC No respond to this the rolling stones Requesting comment on the investigation.
The final issue — an unexpected countywide send — is the one that Stanford says is the most difficult to pin down. Los Angeles OEM said their investigation revealed that the Emergency Operations Center issued an "accurate, well-targeted alert" on January 9, but that "after leaving the EOC," the alert was mistakenly sent far beyond its intended range. . The county said its software provider, Genasys, has been conducting tests to see how this happens.
in a statement rolling stonesGenasys did not elaborate on what may have caused the issue, but said the company has put "additional safeguards" in place to prevent it from happening again, including a new confirmation if an alert is sent without saving the target area message, meaning it will be sent to the entire county.
Stanford said it would be difficult to know outside of an investigation whether the problem was operator error or a system glitch.
"These are very different issues that we need to understand better," he said.
Repair trust
So far, parties involved in the investigation remain focused on figuring out what happened and preventing it from happening again in the short term, rather than proposing any significant solutions. But officials have a simple way to alleviate some of the confusion associated with these alerts — including more details.
While WEA does have character limits, Jeannette Sutton, director of the Emergency and Risk Communications Message Testing Laboratory at the University at Albany, has spent years testing the most effective language to include in these counts. Through her research, she found that the most effective alerts include six components: the name of the source sending the message, a description of the hazard, the location of the hazard, the consequences of the threat, the correct protective measures to take, and when to take it.
Countywide messages sent to Angelenos include many of these details but lack location specificity, making them easily misinterpreted by broader audiences. In the case of a real wildfire threat, this can leave residents confused about where "your zone" is, requiring them to seek more information instead of starting to figure out how to keep themselves safe. More details about timing could also help those who receive repeated alerts recognize that they are false alarms, rather than causing further confusion and fear.
"In some cases, the more information you receive that is actually uncertain, you might decide, 'Well, this isn't for me,' and then you stop paying attention — which is the least of your Things you want people to do,” Sutton said.
Another consequence could be for people to opt out of receiving any further alerts from the county. But there is no way to track whether this is happening and, as Sutton said, alert officials have "zero knowledge" of the numbers, which are not provided to them by mobile operators.
"So, we don't know what the broader impact is of the specific messages that are being sent out," she added, "but the repetitive messages, oh my gosh, you can imagine people are turning them off."