In Kerr County, Texas, officials face questions and backlash for not alerting residents along the Guadalupe River to evacuate sooner.
Utah is no stranger to threats like flooding and wildfires each year, and the Wasatch Front is due for a major earthquake in the next 50 years. When it comes to Utah’s readiness for these events, at least one expert is more optimistic.
“When I think about Utah, I think it's a very prepared state,” said Tom Cova, a professor in the University of Utah’s School of the Environment, Society and Sustainability. His research specializes in environmental hazards, emergency management and geographic information science.
“We actually have a pretty good track record in this state for effectively warning people, having them respond appropriately, and it's been so far so good.”
He said it’s always surprising when the public is confused about what to do during natural disaster events such as the Central Texas flooding because municipalities and states generally have the tools and people to run drills, draft evacuation plans and educate the public on potential natural disasters that could occur in their area.
Several counties in Utah use the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s national system for local alerts, known as the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.
The system works by sending warnings to mobile phones via Wireless Emergency Alerts. It also sends alerts to radio and television via the Emergency Alert System (think of the iconic buzz that interrupts a song for a severe thunderstorm warning) and on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Radio.
Emergency manager for Carbon County Justin Needles said they use both IPAWS and an opt-in reverse 911 alert system.
“When we had the Bear Fire a few years ago, I found them to be adequate for our needs,” he said. “Could they be improved? I'm sure they could, but for what we found here in Carbon County, yes, they're easily usable, they're user friendly.”
The county tries to educate people about various disasters at public events, Needles said, such as the county fair or the International Days festival.
“We do have a county pre-disaster mitigation plan that tells us what our risks are, where our most likely disasters could happen, and then we base our outreach based on those in the time of year,” he said.
Needles didn’t have recent data on the county’s reverse 911 system, but in 2016, around 45% of residents opted in.
“And that's why we chose to go the route of getting IPAWS, getting a cog through FEMA, so we could do an alert that didn't necessarily have to be the opt-in, so if there was a hazard, we could send out the alert that way.”
Opt-in alert services are “plagued by low subscription rates,” according to Cova, but people who are subscribed can warn others around them.
“The good news is you don't really need everyone to be opted in if you think about the way we all text each other,” he said.
In Kerr County, Texas, Cova said the “social side of warning” wasn’t able to take place because counselors and campers at the many riverside camps had limited access to cell phones.
“It's not about whether you have the right technology,” he said. “It's just whether or not people can reason about the threat and confirm it, either visually or by sound or through communicating with someone else and confirming that this is actually really happening.”
Needles said Carbon County hasn’t looked into any additional warning systems, such as sirens.
At the end of the day, they’re relying on people power as much as digital tools.
“We use search and rescue if we have to evacuate people,” he said. “Those would be kind of our main ones: putting out our digital signs and sending people door to door.”
