Do it once Investigate defective emergency alarms in Los Angeles County During the deadly January wildfire, U.S. Congressman Robert Garcia released Report Monday asked for more federal oversight of the private emergency alert system pieced together by the United States.
The investigation was initiated by Garcia and more than a dozen members of the Los Angeles Congressional delegation, and Los Angeles County sent a series of events Evacuation alarm failure On January 9, people are urged to travel 10 million metropolitan areas Prepare to evacuate. The faulty alarm comes two days after a fierce fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades and Altadna.
The alerts were designed to provide a small group of residents near Calabasas, panic and confused as they repeatedly exploded into the community, 40 miles from the evacuation area.
Garcia's office reported that in “Issue Alerts: Lessons for Kenneth Fire False Alerts”, the software company signed with the county to issue wireless emergency alerts, saying technical errors led to false alarms Ping throughout the metropolitan area.
According to Genasys, a Los Angeles County emergency manager correctly preserved an alarm for a narrowly defined polygon in the area near the Kenneth Fire. But the software did not upload the correct evacuation area polygon to Integrated public alarm and warning systempossibly due to local network disruptions in the Los Angeles County Emergency Management Office and its surrounding areas.
The report also found that, contrary to the narrative of Los Angeles County officials at the time, multiple echo alarms followed with high volumes and longer alert durations from the cell phone provider. The report said that the chaos was the vague wording of the original alarm in Los Angeles County.
“It's obvious that there's still too much reform needed to have an operating system that people can rely on and trust in the future,” Garcia told the Times.
The Times has contacted Genasys and La County officials in response to the report.
Garcia, a Long Beach Democrat on the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Commission, said the bets were very high.
“We are talking about the loss of life and property, and the confidence of people in the emergency notification system,” he said. “People need to be able to believe that if there is a natural disaster, they will be alerted and that it will have the right information and we must provide this level of safety and comfort across the country.”
To improve the emergency warning alert system, the report urged Congress and the federal government to “take immediate action to bridge the gaps in alert system performance, certification and public communications.”
The report notes: “The lessons of the Kenneth Fire should not only provide a basis for reforms, but also serve as a catalyst for modernizing the national alert infrastructure before the next disaster strike.”
The report makes some suggestions. It requires additional federal funding for federal emergency management agencies' programs, equipment, training and system maintenance Integrated public alarm and warning systema national system that uses mobile phones to provide emergency public alarms Wireless emergency alarm and through radio and television Emergency Alert System.
It also urged FEMA to fully meet the minimum requirements and improve training for Congress’s iPAWS requirements in 2019, after Hawaii’s emergency management agency issued a false warning about incoming missile strikes to millions of residents and vacationers. The report said Congress requested “standardization, functionality and interoperability of incident management and warning tools” Five years later, FEMA has not completed the implementation of a certification program for users and third-party software providers. The agency plans to conduct a third-party technology certification program this year.
The report also urged the FCC to establish performance standards, develop measurable goals and monitor WEA performance, and ensure that mobile providers also include maps of location attraction by the December 2026 deadline.
But it will certainly be a challenge when President Trump and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem push the FEMA demolition.
Over the past few days, the Trump administration has told U.S. lawmakers that he does not support the elimination of the agency. Noem told us congressmen at a hearing last week that Trump believes the agency “fails the American people, and the FEMA that exists today should respond to disasters with federal support.”
Garcia has called the Trump administration's demolition of FEMA “very worrying.”
“We need to maintain a stable FEMA leadership,” Garcia told The Times. “I hope that the recent reintegration and changes that have occurred won't hinder actually making these systems stronger. We need to be stable on FEMA. We need FEMA to continue to exist. … The sooner we get investment, the sooner we complete these studies, and I think the safer people will feel it.”
Garcia said his office is working to draft legislation to address some of these issues.
“We do need to push the FEMA, we need to push the government – Congress has absolutely played a role in making sure these systems are stronger,” Garcia said. “It is crucial to make sure we fully fund these systems. … There are dozens of systems, but no real centralized rules are modern.”
According to FEMA, more than 40 different commercial providers work in the emergency alert market. But further steps are needed to train local emergency managers and regulate private software companies and wireless providers that play an important role in protecting millions of Americans in the face of severe wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, floods and proactive shooter incidents, an agency official said.
“Continuous efforts are needed to increase alert authorities, improve standardization through service providers, and further collaborate with wireless providers to improve the provision of wireless emergency alerts to the public,” Thomas Breslin, acting deputy administrator of FEMA's National Continuity Program, said in a letter to Garcia.
San Diego-based company Genasys in the nearest SEC filing Its “alarm coverage has been extended to cities and counties in 39 states.” It said that “the vast majority of California’s states” cover its EVAC system, which continues to “grow to the eastern U.S., with coverage extending to Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee.”
Genasys also noted that its alarm system is a “interactive-based” software service, increasing the likelihood of communication interruptions. “The information technology systems we and our suppliers use are susceptible to power outages, crashes, other damages or interruptions in service, system failures, natural disasters, terrorism, wars, and telecommunications and electrical failures,” it said in the SEC filing.
Garcia received the evacuation warning as part of an investigation into how it accidentally sent to nearly 10 million Los Angeles County residents during the Los Angeles fire, Genasys,,,,, Los Angeles County,,,,, FEMA and FCC.
The report says Genasys' software did not upload the correct evacuation zone polygons to IPAWS, which may be due to network outages. The report found that the Genasys system has not warned Los Angeles County emergency management personnel, who lost targeted polygons in the iPad channel before sending the message.
Genasys has since added safeguards to its software, but the report noted that Genasys did not explain in detail how the error occurred. It recommends an independent post-action review of Eaton and Palisades Fire responses “further investigation of Genasys’ statements about the cause of errors and how network outages occur or may prevent polygons from uploading appropriate uploads of polygons to the IPAWS distribution channel.”
The report praised Los Angeles County for canceling the alarm within 2 minutes and 47 seconds and sending a correction message 20 minutes later, indicating that the alarm was “error”.
But it also criticized the county for its ambiguity in wording of the original alarm. It said that some confusion could be avoided if the emergency manager who wrote the alert described the region with higher geographic specificity and included timestamps.
The report also found that a series of false echo alerts issued in the next few days were not caused by the cell phone tower being knocked down due to a fire and returned to the Internet. Instead, they are caused by technical problems with mobile phone networks.
A cell phone company attributed the duplicate alerts to “overload” results because of the duration of the alarm sent during the fire and the fire. The report says the company has installed a temporary patch and is undergoing permanent repairs, but it is not clear whether other networks have enabled safeguards to ensure they don’t experience similar problems.
The report does not delve into the critical delays of electronics Emergency alarms sent to the Altadena area. When flames broke out in Eaton Canyon on January 7, the community on the east side of Altadena received an evacuation order at 7:26 pm, but residents in the West did not receive the order until 3:25 am (the fire began to destroy their neighborhoods). 17 out of 18 people were confirmed dead in the Eaton fire.
Garcia told Times that Altadena's problem appears to be due to human errors, not technical errors in the emergency alert software. Garcia said he and other Los Angeles congressmen are eager to read the McChrystal Group's post-action review of the reaction to the Eaton and Palisade fires.
Garcia said local, state and federal officials all pose some responsibility for the alarm in the Los Angeles fire. In the future, he said Congress should urge the federal government to develop a reliable alarm regulation system.
“It's about when you have so many carriers without these IPAWS requirements,” Garcia said. “We should have a federal standard, which is obvious.”
Garcia told the New York Times that emergency alerts are not just Southern California’s problem.
“These systems are used all over the country,” he said. “This could affect any community, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to move forward and work with FEMA and work with the FCC to make sure we make these adjustments and changes. I think it’s important.”
Times worker Paige St. John contributed to the report.
