Marshall fire evacuation alerts notifications went to less than half of the people who needed to flee

In the first four hours of the Marshall fire’s terrorizing run through Boulder County, emergency officials sent 24,289 alerts to residents’ cellphones as firefighters, sheriff’s deputies, police officers and even public works employees raced through neighborhoods to sound the alarm.

Even with officials employing multiple methods — including social media — to tell people to get out, last month’s fast-moving wildfire raised questions about the effectiveness of systems like Reverse 911 after many residents said they never received an evacuation notice, but managed to escape because they could see the danger out their windows.

And as climate change contributes to more severe natural disasters such as wildfires, floods and tornadoes, survivors of the Marshall fire say now is the time to improve Colorado’s emergency notification systems.

“My thought is just that perhaps it is time to re-evaluate our early alert system,” said Lindsay Smith, a Louisville resident who fled the fire with her sons. “I recognize it’s a fast-moving fire and they struggled with it. But it‘s a good time to look at the system. A lot of people could have saved family pets and valuables.”

The Marshall fire showed how difficult emergency notifications can be in the cellphone age, with technology rapidly changing and local governments trying to stay up-to-date in an arena that is highly regulated by the federal government. In Boulder County, an emergency alert system purchased in late 2019 required people to register online to receive alerts on their cellphones, but many people in the county said they did not know about it until the fire was blazing.

Mike Chard, director of the Boulder Office of Emergency Management, said Boulder County had hoped to have its new emergency alert system fully operational much sooner. But plans to get it going have been disrupted repeatedly by virus outbreaks, the 2020 CalWood fire, burn-scar floods and the mass shooting at a Boulder King Soopers.

“We’ve been hit with every disaster you can imagine in the last 18 months,” Chard said. “I’m glad we didn’t stall out, but I wish we could have gotten it done sooner.”

Boulder County hasn’t been alone in its efforts to keep up.

In Denver, residents have not been able to sign up for cellphone emergency alerts since the city purchased a new system in late 2019, said Andrew Dameron, the city’s 911 director. Denver hopes its new early alert system, which is the same one used by Boulder, is online by the end of the month.

“Personnel losses, the pandemic and all the complications with it caused a delay with getting it up and running,” he said.

And 13 Colorado counties serving a population of nearly 115,000 people are not authorized to send emergency alerts straight to residents’ cellphones.

Most of those counties are on the Eastern Plains or within the state’s southeastern corner. Of those, five are going through the process to become certified to issue cellphone alerts. The others have not started putting a system in place, according to a map created by the Colorado Department of Homeland Security.

The Marshall fire killed at least one person — remains of Robert Sharpe, 69, were found six days after the fire — and Nadine Turnbull, a 91-year-old Superior resident whose home was destroyed, is still missing. It’s unclear whether they received any kind of emergency notification as the fire, fueled by strong winds, tore through unincorporated Boulder County and into Superior and Louisville on Dec. 30.

The 6,000-acre wildfire damaged or destroyed 1,270 homes and businesses. The estimates on damage exceed a half-billion dollars, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history.

A series of alerts

The lack of widespread emergency alerts to residents’ phones happened as Boulder County works to integrate its emergency communications system with a federally controlled wireless emergency alert system, a project that was delayed when the pandemic struck and forced the county’s attention toward that crisis, the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management said in a lengthy explanation of how emergency notification unfolded during the wildfire.

To send emergency alerts, a local agency must be authorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and then hire a private company to build a digital portal that makes it happen. Boulder had taken both steps, Chard said. But installing a completely operational system is a complex project that involves planning, mapping, training and even following guidelines on specific terminology.

Boulder County’s five-page memo on what happened during the Marshall fire evacuation was released Jan. 6 in response to complaints from residents. The document includes a timeline of nine evacuation orders that were sent via the county’s Everbridge emergency notification system over the course of four hours.

Everbridge, which was purchased by Boulder County in late 2019, automatically sends notifications to landlines because telephone companies update their databases into the system regularl, the Boulder County memo said.

But databases of cellphone users essentially don’t exist, said Dameron, Denver’s 911 director. That’s because people use numbers they got years ago when they lived in other places or remain on a family plan even though they no longer live with their parents. So counties ask people who only use cellphones to voluntarily enroll in these programs online.

“There’s no such thing as reliable databases for cellphones,” he said.

The first Marshall fire evacuation order was sent at 11:47 a.m. to 215 contacts, the county’s memo said. That notification said an evacuation order was in place for the area of Colorado 93 and Marshall Road. By then, the fire had been burning for more than 40 minutes.

The second evacuation order was sent at 12:15 p.m. to 2,588 phone numbers as the fire moved quickly and endangered more lives, according to the timeline. And the largest evacuation order alerted 7,251 phone contacts at 1:08 p.m., notifying people in the area of McCaslin Boulevard and U.S. 36 to leave. The final order went to 2,217 people at 2:58 p.m.

Ultimately, the entire populations of Superior and Lousville — 34,320 people — and parts of unincorporated Boulder County were ordered to evacuate. But the messages sent to phones never instructed everyone to get out of Superior, according to the timeline. A message about a mandatory evacuation for the city of Louisville was sent to 4,806 people at 2:51 p.m.

Firefighters and police officers also drove through neighborhoods to spread the word about evacuations, the memo said. In a Jan. 4 City Council meeting, the Louisville fire chief said public works employees also were driving through neighborhoods to tell people to get out.

And multiple law enforcement agencies and fire departments used social media to warn people about evacuations, although some confusion surrounded those messages. Louisville police, for example, tweeted at 1:47 p.m. on Dec. 30 that the city was not under an evacuation order, but then 28 minutes later tweeted that the entire town needed to leave.

“Just really chaotic”

Many residents, including Smith, did not know about Everbridge until after the fire.

“Unfortunately, that’s not when you want to learn about an opt-in for emergency alerts,” Smith said.

On the day of the fire, one of Smith’s sons recognized smoke in the area as a wildfire. They drove about a mile from their Louisville home to get a better look and returned to start packing important papers, clothes and favorite mementos.

“It got hot super fast and the wind was blowing ash and it was happening very quickly,” she said.

They decided to leave but they had not received any notifications on which route to take. Traffic was heavy. The sky was black with smoke. As she drove, Smith called her sister, who unsuccessfully tried to find out which roads were open by searching online. Smith made U-turns — thankful to other drivers who allowed her to do so — and finally found a way out. Her son followed a fire truck to safety.

The family eventually reunited at a hotel in Greeley.

“It was just really chaotic,” she said.

The whole experience left Smith wondering why she didn’t receive an alert on her cellphone about a fire evacuation. After all, she receives Amber Alerts from the state and notifications from the National Weather Service on her phone.

That’s because of the way emergency alert systems are regulated by federal, state and local governments.

FEMA oversees the emergency alerts that are sent to cellphones, based on where the user is in connection to a cell tower, and local agencies are not allowed to send them until they are certified by federal and state authorities.

Boulder County received its certification to use the Wireless Emergency Alerts system in 2019, the emergency management office’s memo said. But the pandemic struck just as the county was putting the system in place and the county is still working to fold the wireless emergency alert system into Everbridge, the memo said.

Targeting more narrowly

Everbridge is a program sold by a private company that allows law enforcement and fire departments to target distinct geographical areas, based upon the addresses that are loaded into the system. Telephone companies regularly update Everbridge with new landlines and delete ones that are no longer in service. But cellphone users must go online and register with Everbridge to be included in the system.

Everbridge has told Denver that it is developing a solution to the lack of a cellphone database and will be able to pull an estimated 80% of the city’s cellphone users into its database, Dameron said. Chard said Boulder County is looking into adding that capability into its Everbridge system as well.

Still, Boulder County could have opted to send a wireless emergency alert through the federal system without using the database in Everbridge.

Boulder County’s explanation as to why it did not use the more broad emergency wireless alerts system on Dec. 30 said those alerts often go to far more people than necessary, which can lead to unnecessary panic and cause traffic jams when more people try to evacuate. The widespread alerts also result in more calls to already stressed 911 centers, the memo said.

“This generally can work as an alerting process in cases such as Amber Alerts, flash flooding or tornados where the action required is to be on the lookout for and report, climb to higher ground or seek shelter in a basement,” Chard wrote in an email to The Denver Post. “Evacuations are different on multiple levels and for the professionals who must make the hard decisions under incredible circumstances, getting people who are immediately in danger out and evacuated requires a planned and coordinated effort.”

Going forward, Boulder County says it will continue using Everbridge and the federal wireless emergency alerts system while adapting to ever-changing technology. The county hopes to create a system where location-based cellphone notifications are more precise and where people are not required to register in advance of an emergency, the memo said.

“Our goal is to alert or warn residents quickly, over a large area and do so without causing negative secondary effects that interfere with the orderly and effective movements of dense populations away from hazardous conditions,” Boulder County officials wrote.

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