Local Officials Have a Powerful Tool to Warn Residents of Emergencies. They Don’t Always Use It.

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.”

Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster.

Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died.

Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning.

“As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.”

Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died.

The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.”

California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country.

Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem.

Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken those critical lessons and made big changes. The county expanded its emergency management office from five to 20 full- and part-time employees, including one whose job is to focus on alerting the public. That isn’t possible in many lower-resourced communities. But by the end of 2020, Sonoma had so improved its approach to alerts that it was among the counties that sent the most — 59 of them — during that dangerous wildfire season. Its two major wildfires that year, while fast and destructive, weren’t as swift-moving through densely populated areas as the worst of 2017’s wildfires. With the new protocol and staff, nobody in Sonoma died in them either.

Jorge Rodriguez is the county’s current alert coordinator. He described the litany of training and exercises required of employees, including creating templates of emergency messages ahead of time. “We really prepare to push the button,” he said.

That’s not true in many places.

Art Botterell, who retired in 2018 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as senior emergency services coordinator, calls the nation’s alert system “a moth-eaten patchwork quilt.” Officials in different places can try to get emergency messages to the public through IPAWS, their local alert programs, social media, email, phone calls, press conferences, flyers, door knocking, sirens, bullhorns and so on. Or they can do none of those things.

But if officials tap too few of them, or wait too long as danger closes in, then the tools become useless.

“The most common mode of warning system failure,” Botterell said, “is failure to initiate warnings in the first place.”

Last month, along the hills of Kerr County in Central Texas, visitors settled into RVs, residents slumbered in homes and summer campers dreamed of fun in the cabins that lace the Guadalupe River. But at 1:14 a.m., a blaring alarm punctured that calm, for those who received it. A National Weather Service alert sounded over weather radios and mobile devices in the area that had service — not a guarantee in this rural stretch — with a flash flood warning.

The weather service can, and often does, send its most pressing messages over IPAWS. But those alerts can lack important information for high-risk locations, including evacuation orders. Local officials can use the system to blast alerts that go to more specific areas — a few streets, a neighborhood, a river — along with directions for what people in those places should do to protect themselves.

It was July 4. Kerr County’s top elected official was asleep at his lake house 100 miles away. The sheriff was at home dozing, too. The emergency manager was sick in bed. That’s what each later said at a Texas legislative hearing. The weather service forecasts they’d heard the day before hadn’t struck them as particularly worrisome.

Farther up the Guadalupe River, around the town of Hunt, rain was falling. It fell and fell, pummeling the area so ferociously that children at camps along the river woke in fear and teenage counselors tried to soothe them. But the rain still poured and the power failed and the river rose. By 3 a.m., the two 911 dispatchers toiling overnight were overwhelmed with the most horrifying of calls. A deputy heard children screaming in the river.

Deputies and volunteer firefighters rushed to pound on doors and rouse people as the river hauled entire homes away, occupants trapped inside. The weather service posted on X, “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”

At 3:57 a.m., someone called 911 from Camp Mystic in Hunt, where hundreds of children were attending Christian summer camp in cabins along the waterways. They climbed through windows, fought floodwaters and cowered under darkness along hillsides. The flood swept many away. At least 27 campers and counselors would die.

At 4:03 a.m., the weather service intensified its messaging for south-central Kerr County to a rare flash flood emergency — its most dire flood alert — which again blasted out over IPAWS to any cellphone that could receive it: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”

The county judge, who as the top elected official heads emergency management, still slept, as did the emergency management coordinator. The sheriff didn’t wake until 4:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, Kerr County sent out an emergency message — but not over IPAWS.

Instead, officials opted for CodeRed, their local alerting system. Using software by companies like Everbridge and Smart911, systems like these are not nearly as far reaching as IPAWS. Residents have to sign up in advance to receive the local alerts, and not many typically do. In comparison, IPAWS is designed to reach any cellphone within a selected geographic area unless a person has turned off its notifications, has the phone turned off or in airplane mode, or isn’t connected to a working cell site broadcasting the alert.

The emergency management coordinator later told Texas legislators that he had helped incorporate IPAWS into Kerr County’s emergency response plans in 2020 partly to help ensure that its large seasonal population receives alerts while in town. But when he was finally woken during the floods that morning, he didn’t use it. He said the weather service had issued more than a dozen alerts already, and he thought that was enough.

By then, more than four hours had passed since the weather service blasted out its first IPAWS alert that day, during which local officials could have started sending their own messages telling people whether to evacuate or otherwise move out of harm’s way. Almost a third of those who died were camping or staying at campgrounds, the Houston Chronicle found.

As Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said at a legislative hearing last month: “We have to find a way to give the locals more tools and more confidence” to make critical calls about issuing alerts quickly. “It cannot be when you see the river cresting.”

No federal policy tells local officials how to send emergency alerts in disasters — or whether to send them at all. Nor are there requirements of what alerts should say or who should get them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, outlines best practices but deems alerting decisions “a matter of local emergency official communications plans, governance, policies and procedures,” a FEMA spokesperson said.

Nor do local authorities have to learn a lot about IPAWS alerts to become authorized to send them. They must complete an online FEMA training module that goes over the basics, then apply for public alerting permission and sign an agreement.

“You do have to demonstrate that you have the software to utilize IPAWS, but you don’t have to demonstrate that you’re good at it,” said Jeannette Sutton, a University at Albany professor and key researcher of public alert messaging. FEMA offers alert guidance and 24/7 technical help, but using them isn’t mandatory. Its IPAWS division also will review local plans for sending alerts and suggest improvements — but local officials must request this help.

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.

Few other county or city governments across the wide swath of Western North Carolina inundated by Helene’s rainfall issued any of their own alerts over IPAWS before the storm knocked out cell service and electricity. Most used only their local systems or social media accounts, although ProPublica found wide variations across the region. Some made more aggressive efforts to warn residents, including rounds of door knocking. One county distributed flyers; another issued a dire video warning. But most residents remained in their homes, largely unaware that catastrophic danger approached. The vast majority of deaths in North Carolina were flood-related.

IPAWS asked Sutton to assess the warning messages sent during Helene. She wasn’t impressed: “There was a total lack of consistency.”

During his first weeks as a new congressman in 2023, Rep. Kevin Mullin’s district in Northern California faced flooding that left one person dead. A Democrat from the San Francisco area, he began doing research. He read about incidents in other areas where alerts were confusing, delayed or not sent, leading to terrible consequences.

“This is really at the core of what government needs to get right — protecting public health and safety, protecting lives,” Mullin said. “The emergency alert is quite literally the front line of public interface.”

He also was looking for potentially bipartisan issues to work on. He hopes he’s found one.

Mullin and his staff are crafting a bill that would authorize $30 million a year for a decade to help FEMA provide technical assistance to authorities who send alerts. The money would fund things like live testing, field training and community-based exercises that can identify weaknesses in disaster plans and alert systems. These can be tough for local governments with fewer resources to afford. FEMA also would develop metrics for assessing alerts’ effectiveness.

Mullin, who expects to introduce the bill in the coming days, also supports creating basic standard operating procedures for alerts and templates for messages. “We need to bring some coherence to the way this infrastructure is set up,” he said.

The template piece is out there. In 2021, FEMA hired Sutton’s team at the University at Albany to create the Message Design Dashboard. The new online toolkit walks message writers through a series of prompts to more quickly create an alert that includes content that social scientists have found best reduces the time people delay before taking action.

“By giving that tool to emergency managers, it’s a game changer,” Sutton said. “They’re not staring at that blank box anymore.”

Before her team’s contract ended in May, they trained 500 emergency managers to use the software, which is now free and publicly available through FEMA. But thousands more still need to be trained. And nothing requires emergency managers to learn to use it. That is up to them, and they still ultimately must decide for themselves whether to push that button.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Mollie Simon contributed research.