Why Sonoma County Didn't Send a Cellphone Alert as the 2017 Wildfires Hit

On the night of October 8, 2017, wind-driven wildfires tore out of the hills north of Santa Rosa, California, and into neighborhoods while most residents were asleep. Sonoma County had the technical means to push a Wireless Emergency Alert, the loud, Amber Alert-style message that reaches every cellphone in an area. It chose not to. Instead it relied on opt-in services, SoCo Alert and Nixle, that reached only people who had signed up, plus deputies going door to door. This video [1][2] combines sheriff’s deputies’ body camera and radio footage from that night with Sheriff Rob Giordano’s defense of the decision days later. Twenty-four people died in Sonoma County [4].

Key Moments

”Leave your homes”

The footage opens with deputies moving through burning neighborhoods: “This is the mandatory evacuation order. Leave your homes. Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, mandatory evacuation order, leave your homes.” On the radio, deputies call in a “carry out” of a disabled resident who cannot walk, and one deputy guides a woman to safety with “Watch your leg, watch your leg.” Another reports a home already burning: “Hold up, hold up. There’s a house on fire. Let’s go.” Units in the Mark West Springs area call for a “priority evacuation,” then report that they must come off the hill themselves.

”Panic is what gets people killed”

At a news conference afterward, Giordano explained why the county did not alert every phone. He said he was on scene by midnight and saw residents in Larkfield unable to get out because of gridlock heading to Highway 101. “This county is heavily populated in that 101 corridor,” he said in the video. “And had we had people come from all directions into that corridor, I’m concerned we would have had more deaths of people in their cars trying to get out.” Asked whether a fire like this was exactly the moment for alarm, he answered: “Yeah, but panic is what gets people killed if you have everyone panicked out on the roads” [3]. A county spokeswoman, Jennifer Larocque, made a similar argument: a mass alert “would cause unnecessary evacuations and delays for emergency vehicles reaching people in areas in need of help.”

Overloaded dispatch and burned towers

Giordano described a communications system under siege. Dispatchers were taking about 300 calls an hour, and, he said, the fire burned telephone poles, landlines and cellphone towers. He also cited the reach of the county’s opt-in alerts and urged residents to sign up for SoCo Alert, which he described as “like the emergency broadcast system” for the county.

The Lake County comparison

Reporters pressed him on neighboring Lake County, the only county in the fire zone that sent a wireless alert, and which had no fire deaths [6]. “I don’t think you compare Lake County to Sonoma County,” Giordano said. “Very different areas.”

Background: The Tubbs Fire

The deadliest fire that night was the Tubbs Fire. Starting near Calistoga late on October 8, it reached Santa Rosa within hours. It killed 22 people and destroyed 5,636 structures, making it the most destructive wildfire in California history at the time, until the Camp Fire a year later [7]. Across several counties north of San Francisco, the October fires killed 44 people and destroyed 8,900 buildings [5].

What the State Review Found

In February 2018, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services released a review of Sonoma County’s alerts [4][5]. It found that the county “had in place an established public alert and warning capability,” but that its procedures were “uncoordinated and included gaps, overlaps, and redundancies,” and that the county “lacked reliable, timely, and coordinated situational awareness” during the first hours. The decision not to send a wireless alert, it said, was “influenced by a limited awareness and understanding of the system’s capabilities.” Most bluntly, “checklists or detailed procedures for deciding what warnings to issue, when, and in what form” were “almost entirely absent.” The report made 11 recommendations, starting with an updated plan for how each warning system should be used.

The review answered the sheriff’s central worry. The county’s former emergency manager, Christopher Helgren, had ruled out mass cellphone alerts about a year before the fires out of fear of panic and traffic jams [4][5]. The state found the decision rested on a misunderstanding of what the system could do.

Fact Check

“15 dead in Sonoma County alone and 400 people listed as missing.” These were the figures at the time the video was published. The final toll in Sonoma County was 24 dead [4].
Lake County’s “zero fire deaths.” Accurate. Lake County, the only county in the fire zone to send a wireless alert, recorded no deaths [6].
The case against a mass alert. The state review did not accept it. It found the decision rested on “a limited awareness and understanding of the system’s capabilities” and recommended using wireless alerts for all critical warnings [4][5].

What Happened Next

The cause: In January 2019, Cal Fire concluded that the Tubbs Fire was started by a private electrical system next to a home, not by PG&E equipment [8].
A different response in 2019: Two years later, when the Kincade Fire broke out north of Healdsburg, Sonoma County ordered about 180,000 residents to evacuate [10]. A sheriff’s sergeant said the alert systems had been upgraded since the Tubbs Fire and credited better coordination and earlier, more orderly evacuations [12]. No one died in the Kincade Fire [9][11].