Glass fire warnings abundant compared to 2017 firestorm alert failures

The first warning Jennifer Stark received on a hot, windy night in 2017 that a fast-moving fire was heading toward Kenwood in the Sonoma Valley was an ominous red glow outside the window.

She and her husband got their daughter, two dogs and cat into cars just before flames hit her Sonoma Valley community without receiving a single warning from officials about fire burning into their town.

Three years later, it was a different story.

The Glass fire erupted before 4 a.m. Sunday east across the Mayacamas Mountains and in the Napa Valley — far from Kenwood. But by 5:46 a.m. Stark had received a text message from Sonoma County alerting her that smoke and ash from that fire was drifting into the area.

She had been tracking the fire all day by the time she received a text from the county at 8:29 p.m. Sunday warning that fire was on St. Helena Road, followed by an 8:47 p.m. message that it was getting closer.

The fires of 2017 had taught Stark how quickly fire can move, so they had already packed essential items plus provisions for three adults, two big dogs and a cat into their vehicles by the time they were ordered to evacuate at 9:25 p.m.

That alert briefly sucked the oxygen out of her lungs.

“My heart sank and I froze,” Stark said. “We were logistically prepared, but I wasn’t prepared emotionally.”

But they were ready. She took a moment to muster strength and got her family out the door.

“This time, we were completely prepared,” Stark said. “We have go bags packed, we have an emergency evacuation plan, a large garbage can packed with everything we need.”

No subsequent wildfire in Sonoma County can truly be compared to the half-dozen major wildfires that broke out the night of Oct. 8, 2017, and burned into communities across a vast area from Geyserville to Glen Ellen, destroying more than 5,300 homes across the county. The Tubbs fire ignited near Calistoga in northern Napa County and burned a furious path into Santa Rosa city limits within about 3½ hours.

The lessons of that firestorm have transformed how the county and city warn people about developing disasters.

“Absolutely there is a difference; there is an improvement,” Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin said. “The incredible coordination that we have between the city and the county and Cal Fire and all of our first responders has been so much different than it was three years ago.“

Until then, the prevailing emergency management philosophy was to avoid the “never cry wolf” syndrome by warning people only when details and threat are fully confirmed. But those 2017 fires taught everyone from residents to emergency professionals and elected leaders that today’s wildfires are too fast to delay communication.

Now, the philosophy is to evacuate communities earlier, warn people sooner and more broadly, a pendulum shift toward sending alerts to more people than necessary rather than risk leaving people in the dark about imminent danger.

Officials have called for all residents to prepare themselves for emergencies with evacuation plans, go bags and neighborhood phone trees. And like the Starks, many have.

But they have also embraced the duty to take an aggressive stance for warning people about threats like wildfires.

In 2017, county and city officials called on nearly the entirety of the region’s firefighting and law enforcement forces to the aid of thousands of people when huge fast-moving fires broke out in the middle of the night.

But local emergency managers had no plans for how to effectively warn people about an immediate threat like a wildfire burning into neighborhoods. People woke up to flames in their neighborhoods and got into their cars only to be met with bumper-to-bumper traffic from narrow forested roadways to suburban streets with so many trying to escape at once.

Fleeing people suffered horrible burns and other injuries in their frantic flight.

The Glass fire comes close to the Tubbs in echoing how quickly a secondary blaze spread from a remote forested area along St. Helena Road to Santa Rosa city limits.

“It was literally something we’ve been planning for since 2017,” Santa Rosa Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal said.

The county and city now employ multiple methods of alerting people to danger — sign-up programs like Nixle and SoCo Alerts plus cellpone push notifications permitted by the federal government called Wireless Emergency Alerts.

There are at least 50 fire detection cameras installed on peaks and ridges throughout the North Bay region.

Fifteen hours after that fire erupted on the eastern rim of the Napa Valley, another fire erupted across the valley near the Sonoma-Napa county line near St. Helena Hill Road and Spring Mountain Summit Trail.

Lowenthal was driving on Mark West Springs Road when he heard the first dispatch report about that secondary blaze about 7:20 p.m., initially reported at 5 acres and dubbed the Shady fire.

He pulled over, opened up his computer to check out the live footage from fire detection cameras.

He saw a glow in a forested area of the county on the opposite side of the Napa Valley from the main Glass fire. He also saw a smoke column leaning over “like it was pushing in the direction of Santa Rosa.”

“We’ve known that area of the county was a direct threat to Santa Rosa,” Lowenthal said. “That is the threat to the city: the unburned area between the Nuns and Tubbs fire scars. Did I think that was something we were going to have to deal with this year? No way. But we had been planning.”

Before he’d heard anything from engine crews sent to the scene, Lowenthal was on the phone and setting in motion the city’s plans to issue alerts, translate messages into Spanish and empty neighborhoods before the fires hit.

The city sent its first warning through cellphone push notifications — called Wireless Emergency Alerts — at 8:47 p.m., asking residents to prepare to evacuate neighborhoods west of Calistoga Road, in Skyhawk to the base of Los Alamos Road.

The city followed up with more detailed messages using Nixle, an opt-in program that can send longer messages through email.

Lowenthal recalled driving into Rincon Valley toward Skyhawk and seeing “a ghost town.”

“The true success of this is we got everybody out, and that way the engines and firefighters poured into Santa Rosa and were able to engage in spot fires, house fires and not have to deal with thousands and thousands of people evacuating,” Lowenthal said. ”They had the freedom to focus on suppression.“

Technology glitches and other errors meant not everyone received the right message at the right time during the first days of the Glass fire.

Some people described not receiving emergency messages to their phones that others in their households received. Others reporting receiving alerts days after the intended receipt.

Gorin said she received no alerts through Nixle or cellphone push notifications. She was warned by a text announcement from the county and through a neighborhood emergency group.

Residents in unincorporated areas complained that while Santa Rosa used geographical terms to describe evacuation zones, the county relied on seemingly random letter-number codes to designate areas that gave them no clue.

One block west of Calistoga Road in Rincon Valley, resident Mike Brown said he received no alerts to his landline or cellphone Sunday night when the fire came bearing down, burning a wall of nearby Maria Carrillo High School. He had signed up for all the alerting programs offered by the city and county.

Brown, a retired sheriff’s deputy, was aware of the fire in Napa County and monitoring its progress Sunday. But it wasn’t until after nightfall that he knew fire was burning in Sonoma County when he saw fire on the eastern hills bordering the neighborhoods.

“No hi-lo sirens, no calls from Code Red, no Nixles,” said Brown, referring to the software programs employed by the city to warn people.

His wife left first and headed toward Santa Rosa to get Brown’s 93-year-old mother. Brown left at 12:30 a.m., meeting bumper-to-bumper traffic with fire already at Calistoga Road.

Days later, when Brown returned home, he found a 5:21 a.m. message warning about a fire on his landline voice mail.

“That’s way too late,” Brown said.

Santa Rosa City Emergency Preparedness Coordinator Neil Bregman said there is an aspect of technology and software out of the city’s control, but they did send out messages early and often quickly after they became aware that fire on St. Helena Road was heading toward the city.

“We learned from 2017 that minutes count,” Bregman said. “We don’t wait to put it all out at once. We get the fastest tool going.”

Gorin said the fact the vast majority of people evacuated safely and no deaths have been reported so far “tells me we are finding significant improvements in our alert and warning systems.”

“But let’s continue our progress,“ Gorin said.

She called for more coordination among neighboring counties and referenced a cellphone push notification from Napa County on Thursday that reached — and baffled — people in Santa Rosa and other areas.

Just after 11 a.m. Thursday, Napa County officials issued a broad alert that warned vaguely about “fire danger” — a message that was unintentionally broadcast to cellphones in at least three counties.

Napa County had only used cellphone emergency alerts once before, county spokesperson Janet Upton said. It has a robust audience through the web-based communication program Nixle — 215,000 subscribers for a county with just under 140,000 residents — that is the primary way it warns and informs residents.

An earlier cellphone notification sent by the county appeared to be more successful. Targeting an area of northern Napa County threatened by the fire, the county issued a warning at 12:22 a.m. Monday, concerned about residents who might be asleep and unaware of danger, Upton said.

That second message, sent Thursday when the fire picked up from Calistoga to Angwin, did not have the effect intended, Upton said.

“We received a hard lesson on the limitations of that tool when the message bled over into our neighboring counties,” Upton said. “We’ll review what went well and what can be improved.”

Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick said he’s heard people complain they received alerts in Healdsburg, far from the fire’s threat. He’s also heard from people asking why they receive the same warning message on so many platforms, from push notifications to cellphones and texts to emails.

“The most common story I hear is, ’Gosh, you know, I'm getting notified and all these different platforms and it's the same message over and over again,” ’ Essick said. “Well, it's intentional. It's intentional that we want to try to notify on as many platforms as we can because not everybody has a cellphone. Maybe it's also on the radio. Maybe it's on their TV.”

Santa Rosa resident Will Abrams lost his home in the 2017 Tubbs fire and was in the bull’s-eye of the Glass fire late Sunday and early Monday in the rented home his family has lived in since then in the Skyhawk neighborhood.

Abrams said he learned the fire was heading their way when he looked out the window, saw neighbors packing their cars and went outside. Though the neighborhood is in the city, his neighbors had received alerts from the county but Abrams had not.

He evacuated his family. Their home survived, although about 15 houses were destroyed when the fire came down the hill and into the neighborhood.

Abrams criticized some jurisdictions for misusing Nixle to broadcast nonemergency information, recalling messages he’s received about Christmas holiday toy drives. He no longer subscribes to the service because of that issue, but is connected through the county’s SoCo Alert program.

“I started getting messages, ’Santa Claus is coming to town. Ho ho ho,’ ” Abrams said. “As much as a Jewish guy can, I like Santa. But it’s not the best use of a public resource.”

Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay contributed to this report. You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.