DENVER — During the Marshall Fire, Boulder County turned down the state's offer to help with evacuation alerts using the wireless emergency alert system that hits cell phones in a certain radius.
According to an emailed response by Boulder County Emergency Management Director Mike Chard, the county turned down the help for multiple reasons, but among them, the county had already sent seven evacuation notices using the opt-in Everbridge system. Another reason was that the county had not practiced integrating the state in local evacuations previously.
On January 5, Jackson County asked for the state's help with wireless emergency alerts during a winter storm that had multiple highways shut down.
"I just wanted to ping every cell phone in Jackson County," said Jackson County Administrator Matt Canterbury. "The people stuck were not locals, the people that were stuck here. That was the rationale behind that."
The emergency alert said:
"Highway closures due to adverse weather conditions: Highway 14 East, Highway 14 West, Highway 125 South. The designated shelter for stranded travelers is located at 410 Washington Street. No unnecessary travel, except for medical emergencies."
"We sent that out and let people know where the shelter was, the address of the shelter and the fact that the roads are still closed," said Canterbury. "We used it because we wanted to notify people that if you were stuck in Jackson County, in Walden, we don't want you on the roads that are closed. We don't want you to try to get out of town because it puts more strain on our EMS services and our Sheriff's Department."
Jackson County uses CodeRED for opt-in emergency notifications. Those alerts to go landlines and people who have opted-in their cell phones and email addresses. The county did not use the opt-in alert for this storm.
"Truthfully, the reasoning behind not using that is if there was someone that was not registered with that system, they wouldn't get the alert," said Canterbury. "Mainly, we were trying to target people that were coming into the county that were new."
Survivors of the Marshall Fire have voiced their concerns about learning about the fire from neighbors or social media and not from the city or county. Many learned they needed to be signed up for an opt-in system they did not know about or thought they had already signed up.
Boulder County was approved to use the IPAWS system -- Integrated Public Alert and Warning System -- in 2019. IPAWS is the system that allows for WEA -- Wireless Emergency Alerts -- that ping cell phones in a certain area. The county has not yet finished setting up the system. The county's emergency management office has said it will finish setting it up and utilize it as an alerting system later this year.
Had the county accepted the help from the state, it would have required at least one person from the county to coordinate with one person from the state.
Watch the video above to see how the wireless emergency alert works.
A message sent as a wireless emergency alert needs to be 360 characters or less and 90 characters or less for phones that use 3G.
"We absolutely have to have a 90-character (message) because you have to be able to reach those older phones," said Elizabeth Ownsby, Operations Section Chief for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Messages sent as a wireless emergency alert should have a clear, actionable message, not just a warning. And the system allows the messages to be sent in English and Spanish.
"My phone is set for English. If it was set for Spanish, then it would ignore the English message and only show me the Spanish one," said Ownsby.
Just like Boulder County, Jackson County is approved to use IPAWS, but has not finished setting up the system.
"There is a formal training that the dispatchers have to go through that they have not done yet, and that is why I went through the state," said Canterbury.