Alert System Unused in Fire

As the deadly Cedar fire raced toward mountain communities early on the morning of Oct. 26, San Diego County did not activate an emergency system that uses radio and television stations to warn about natural disasters.

The fire killed 12 people that morning, including some who died trying to escape the flames. But Tom Amabile, a senior coordinator for the San Diego County Office of Emergency Services, said his office was not told that evacuations were occurring until 3 a.m., after the fires had swept through several communities. Amabile said he was never asked to start up the Emergency Alert System, which would have prompted radio and televisions stations throughout the county to broadcast information that neighborhoods need to evacuate.

San Diego County’s Operational Area Emergency Plan states that either a fire department or police agency can request an emergency alert.

But state fire officials and the Sheriff’s Department said they did not think it was their job to ask for the alert.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection coordinated the firefighting effort and the Sheriff’s Department handled evacuations.

For his part, Amabile said he didn’t have enough information to issue an alert without guidance from sheriff’s and fire officials.

“If someone needs [an alert] message sent out, it comes to us and we do it. We don’t do it on our own,” Amabile said. “Most of the fatalities were in remote areas. Whether [an alert] would have changed that I don’t know. It was a very fast-moving and unpredictable fire.”

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Robert Apostolos said Thursday he believed an alert probably would have been helpful when the fire was threatening the first homes in San Diego Country Estates. Authorities began evacuating residents about 11 p.m. on Oct. 25, and Apostolos said many people might have still been watching television at that time. No one was killed in the development, but 25 homes burned.

The Federal Communications Commission requires local governments to establish and test emergency broadcast agreements with radio and television stations. It’s a resource that’s often underutilized, said one expert in the field.

“The most common failure mode for warning systems is precisely that they don’t get used at all,” said Art Botterell, a warning systems consultant in Fairfield, Calif., and a trustee of the Partnership for Public Warning, formed in 2001 to improve the nation’s public warning capability. “It’s not the technology that breaks. It’s the process.”

Amabile said he first learned of the fire about 6 p.m., when firefighters thought it could be contained to a remote area in the mountains of northern San Diego County. Sheriff’s officials called him about 3 a.m. on Oct. 26 and told him they were setting up evacuation centers because the fire was rapidly spreading. Sheriff officials did not ask him to initiate the Emergency Alert System, he said. (The Cedar fire would become the state’s largest, consuming about 300,000 acres and destroying 2,200 homes.)

The fire struck the first homes about midnight on Oct. 26 -- in San Diego Country Estates -- and within a few hours spread into rural areas near the Barona Indian reservation, where most of the deaths occurred. Sheriff’s and fire officials said they did not get a chance to evacuate the homes where the victims died.

Sheriff’s officials said Thursday that they are not certain it’s their job to ask the county emergency officials to begin the warnings.

“I don’t think we’ve ever gone through them for a fire in the past,” said San Diego Sheriff’s Cmdr. Lori Bird. “I don’t know that we would necessarily think of activating the EAS because that would really be the bailiwick of” Amabile’s office.

Charles Maner, chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s San Diego unit, said activating a warning system is not the job of his department, either.

“Generally, we rely on sheriffs to handle evacuations for us. How they go about doing it, they have their methods,” Maner said. “It’s not a CDF role. It’s our job to fight the wildland fire.”

Amabile, who’s worked for the county emergency office since 1987, said he was aware of one previous instance in which the county used the Emergency Alert System -- a fire earlier this year in the city of La Mesa. The system was used to inform La Mesa residents of evacuations at the request of law enforcement officials, Amabile said. He said he did not fault sheriff’s officials for not asking the county to use the alert system last month.

“There’s lots of other fires [in which] people have been evacuated at 3 a.m. and nothing ever came of it,” Amabile said.

He said county emergency workers plan to review their response to the Cedar fire, including why the alert system was not used.

“Some things go well. Some things don’t go well and could be done better. We need to sit down and see what we can do to improve our response because it’s never perfect. But we’re continually trying to make it perfect,” Amabile said.

Some residents who lived near the Barona reservation said they evacuated on their own, without warnings from officials, and drove through fire but could not get any updates on local radio. Amabile said he did not know if the warning system could have saved lives.

“It’s impossible to say. Were their TVs on? Were they awake? At this point, I don’t think anything is gained by speculating one way or the other,” Amabile said.

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Times researcher Penny Love contributed to this report