False Evacuation Orders Are the Last Thing L.A. Needs
In my neighborhood—a mobile-home park on the western side of Malibu—the power and gas have been out for days, and cell service is intermittent at best. If I drive to the right vantage points, I can see the Palisades Fire and Kenneth Fire—two of the five major fires blazing across Los Angeles—but they are still far away. My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service.
As far as I can tell, these notices have all been in error. Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. (The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The first alert jolted my phone yesterday afternoon. My family had already loaded the essentials in the car earlier this week, but we started packing in whatever else would fit, thinking that this might be the last chance we had to save anything we valued. Dad and I heaved my mother’s old rodeo saddle through the living room as she took a call from a woman worried about a friend of ours whom no one had heard from since the night before. Mom had the phone crooked under her ear, moving back and forth through the house. She gathered a photograph of her father and the tablecloth crocheted by my great-great-great-grandmother—a Californian, like me. But every time she went to a new part of the house to get some other keepsake, the call would cut out, and she wouldn’t be able to hear what her friend was saying.
“Just stop moving,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, “but what else am I supposed to do?” The tablecloth was in our kitchen; the photograph of her dad was in the living room; she still wanted to see if we could find the old Super 8 tapes we’d been meaning to digitize. We had to get ready to leave.
We learned that the first notification had been sent out in error. Mom’s employer, Pepperdine University, sent an email clarifying that, according to multiple sources, officials had accidentally sent the warnings countywide, rather than to only the people who actually needed to evacuate.
The second notice came as we drove through a canyon, on our way to the woman who had called earlier. We got the third when we pulled into her driveway. For all I know, these could have been the same alerts, pinging my phone again from different cell towers as we drove through L.A. County.
Mom checked the Watch Duty app before we went into our friend’s house. The platform sends her alerts about fire perimeters, evacuations, and any new blazes cropping up. This app has been the only way we’ve had any sense of the gray area of danger between the fire is far away and leave now. Looking at Watch Duty, we judged that we were in the clear—that these notifications were inaccurate. But we kept our phones close.
The third and fourth evacuation warnings came through on the way home. Again, we had no idea whether to trust them. From what we could tell of the fire’s movements, from the radio and from Watch Duty, the perimeter was still very far away from us. The wind had gone quiet. Mom and I fell asleep at about 4 a.m.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m.—on my phone. My parent’s phones were silent, and they were still asleep. I woke Mom up to check Watch Duty. From what we could tell, these notices were also false. At least now we were awake in case they turned out to be real.
If we had to leave, we weren’t entirely sure where we would go. Most of our local friends have already had to evacuate; we have yet to find a hotel with a vacancy. Mom and I keep talking over our options—whether we should drive to Santa Cruz, San Francisco, or Las Vegas, where we have friends waiting for us.
The eighth notification came at about 8 a.m today. The ninth, around 9 a.m. The tenth, around 11:30 a.m. The 11th, as I finished writing this dispatch.
My family might be outliers in the sheer number of false alarms we keep receiving. Two of our friends in other neighborhoods received only that first false alarm yesterday and haven’t received anything since. (Some people received a correction notice from L.A. County.) But our next-door neighbor told us this morning that several evacuees staying with her got evacuation alerts last night too.
Even one false evacuation alert is, of course, a problem. Everyone around me is desperate for any bit of information that might tell us what’s happening and what we need to do next. It’s alarming when my phone—my one portal to fire updates and messages from friends—keeps screeching that I may need to get up and go, with seemingly no relation to the reality I see out my window.
Between the probably-false-but-maybe-not evacuation notifications, my loved ones are texting to ask if my family is okay. I am grateful they are asking, and at the same time, I truly do not know what to tell them. Not being able to trust the alerts that are supposed to tell us when we are safe or not has rattled us. We keep talking with our neighbors, trying to figure out where the fires are.