Victims of negligence: California residents say the authorities did not warn about the evacuation

Фото: Depositphotos

Sonoma County suffered the most from fires in Northern California, killing at least 19 people there.

Residents of this region say they did not receive evacuation notices from the authorities and left their homes after they saw the fire on their own or were warned by their neighbors, writes Buzz Feed.

Those who received notifications in social networks or through the alert system Nixle, it is said that warnings appeared after they had already been evacuated.

In other districts where there were no deaths, the authorities launched a warning system of the type of alarms: when users had a telephone call, giving out messages about the approaching fire.

Sonoma County authorities have announced that they intend to revise their decision not to send residents a large-scale warning about the fire, which could affect more than half a million people in the region, not all of whom were to be evacuated.

The wireless alert system sends an emergency alert to all cell phones in the target region. But Sonoma County officials said they refused to use this system because such a number of messages could cause unnecessary panic and chaos, traffic jams on the streets and delays in responding to emergency situations. Last summer, during a fire in California, this is exactly the situation.

“This was not negligent behavior, but it seemed like the best and most appropriate solution to the situation,” said Hannah Eiser, a spokeswoman for Sonoma County officials.

But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which launched the wireless alert system in 2012, denied that the alert might affect those who do not need to be evacuated, because the sender of this alert has the ability to change the geographical settings that define the area in which it will be distributed. a warning.

However, the representative of FEMA noted that the creation of geographically targeted warnings is complicated by the fact that geo-adjustments must be repelled by the locations of mobile phone towers, which means that officials need to know the specific location of towers to send such messages, which “is not common easily obtainable information. "

District authorities said they sent warnings to certain parts of the region through social networks, Nixle and SoCoAlert, which before the fires were signed by less than half of the residents of the district.

Some warnings did not reach the residents' telephones due to damage to mobile towers due to fire and falling trees.

At the same time, the Sonoma County authorities noted that after the fires were overcome, they would carefully consider how they used the system to warn residents about the danger and draw conclusions for the future.

In Napa County, authorities used a warning system NixleHowever, many residents received an incomplete warning text due to the fact that the elements of the element damaged the office of the sheriff's office of the county with which the warnings go.

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