Grand Jury: Contra Costa emergency warning system endangers residents

RICHMOND — A new ominous civil grand jury report found Contra Costa County’s community warning system inadequate, asserting that the voluntary opt-in network could fail to quickly and accurately notify up to 70% of residents of imminent danger during a wildfire, earthquake or other major disasters.

Across the United States, warnings are sent through a slew of texts, phone alerts, calls, social media posts and other media broadcasts — vital tools to notify people about wildfires, earthquakes, floods and other life-threatening disasters.

But these alerts frequently fail to fully quell the ripple effects of devastation, illustrated most recently by the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century that ripped through Maui last August, following slow responses from emergency officials, internal communication breakdowns, limited internal communication, inoperative cell towers and a stretched-thin dispatch center.

One of the most glaring concerns identified by the civil grand jury is the reliance on a single, on-call officer within the Sheriff’s Office to respond to alerts and connect to the warning system’s network. Excluding alerts related to refineries and chemical plants, Contra Costa County is the only Bay Area county that does not train dispatchers to monitor and activate alerts during emergencies, according to a 2018 survey.

Moreover, the report determined that an independent, comprehensive risk analysis of the current alert system has not been conducted since the county took over operations in 2001.

“Contra Costa County should not wait for risks to be identified whenever some part of its warning system fails in an actual emergency,” the report said. “The success of any particular warning system is highly dependent on the redundancies built into the system in order to ensure alerts reach as many people as possible.”

The June 3 report validated several concerns that people have unsuccessfully tried to flag for years, including Richmond City Councilmember Soheila Bana, who founded the West Contra Costa Fire Safe Council in 2022 and wrote a letter to the grand jury last year after repeated, fruitless attempts to contact the Board of Supervisors, Sheriff’s Office and other staff to take action on projects that may have previously been deemed too expensive, redundant or not worth the effort.

“I feel like we need to be more active than before — making sure the recommendations go through the way they should,” Bana said Tuesday. “I don’t know why nobody paid attention to this until now, but it’s obvious (the existing community warning system is) not working the way it should, or in an optimized way.”

Officials from Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to spokesperson Kristi Jourdan, “Contra Costa County does not comment on Grand Jury reports until the Board of Supervisors has reviewed the document and has had a chance to respond.”

But the imminent threat of disaster looms as time keeps ticking, especially in a region dotted with oil refineries, dense urban neighborhoods, acres of high-risk open space, fault lines and a network of hazardous material pipelines.

In the event of disasters, such as fast-moving wildfires, the June 3 grand jury report said emergency response experts advocate for alerts to be drafted and sent to the public within 20 minutes, while other drills have prioritized a 10-minute response — an urgency that the report said “can make the difference between life or death.”

Failures to deliver timely warnings have killed and injured scores of people in California and across the country; lagging notifications contributed to 85 deaths as the 2018 Camp Fire devastated the town of Paradise, as well as the 44 people killed in a series of Wine Country fires in 2017.

Warnings also came too late for hundreds of residents that required rescue after Coyote Creek flooded in February 2017 following heavy atmospheric river storms — ultimately forcing 14,000 people to evacuate and causing an estimated $100 million in damage.

Bana hopes the report will force local officials to take concerns about the current CWS system more seriously, especially after the city of Richmond conducted two evacuation drills in 2022 and 2023, which revealed that half of participants either did not receive alerts or were notified hours after the drill was complete — issues that the county failed to verify, interrogate or study, according to the grand jury report.

As the risk of several system failures continues to threaten Contra Costa County, the grand jury recommended that county officials automatically enroll all county residents and businesses in the county’s community warning system (CWS), deploy long-range acoustic devices that can broadcast audible messages up to a mile away, train dispatchers within the sheriff’s office to operate the CWS and certify first responder trainings across local agencies.

Additionally, the report calls for county officials to create an advisory body comprising of warning system and county emergency response experts tasked with guiding the design and operation of the CWS, as well as commission a third-party risk analysis of the CWS’ processes, procedures, hardware, and software.

The grand jury called for each of the eight recommendations to be implemented by 2025, and suggested that county officials tap funds from Measure X — a countywide, 20-year, 1/2 cent sales tax that voters approved in 2020 for emergency response — to start an opt-out alert system, acoustic studies for LRAD deployment, mobile apps for evacuation information and risk analysis of the current CWS.

In the meantime, Bana said she hopes that Contra Costa County leaders take the time to work alongside local city and advocacy groups that have already started researching current risks and issues facing their communities.

“We’ve flagged all these issues before, but the answer from the Sheriff’s Office has been, ‘everything’s working perfectly the way it should,’” Bana said. “It shouldn’t take us to go to the grand jury to get their attention that something needs to be fixed.”