December
32,021 three
0804 PM. The address of the emergency.
We're supposed to be evacuated.
As flames closed in,
how will I know when it's time to evacuate?
Few knew what to do.
We will send that notification
on mandatory evacuation and
we've been notification will
come through on my cell phone.
Just something you have to sign up
for if you don't have a landline.
It's called everbridge.
We were checking in with social
media and it seemed like there was a
fire over on Marshall Rd somewhere.
Chris and Jane Fuller thought
the danger was still miles away
and we didn't really think anything of it.
It wasn't Chris looked out of
the window and up the street.
There were flames coming from our house.
Just you know, six or seven houses up
and at that point it was just a panic.
Panic, thanks. They said
to zero. Notice for them or for others
near Saint Andrews Lane. We didn't
get any notification at all,
nothing and we never got it.
Well, it's a failure. It's a failure.
It's an abject failure.
I mean, it makes me angry.
Frankly, I expected somebody to
call me or text me on my phone
and say it's time to evacuate.
Jane Fuller's anger is due to the fact
that Boulder County had a system that
could have alerted her cell phone.
And every phone in the area.
The expectation should be that we're
using every tool we can to alert people.
And yet Boulder County's Mike Charred
knows that system had yet to go live.
He blames, among other things,
the pandemic, and we hit COVID and we were,
you know, and their operational
response COVID the priority was dealing
with saving lives in the county.
Here's why that matters the day of the fire.
Boulder was only set-up to alert
cell phone users who had signed up
or opted in to receive warnings
and that day in Boulder County.
Only 24% of cell phone users had
opted in if we would have known that
this was going to hit on the 31st.
Obviously there could have been
some reprioritization of it.
Had that reprioritization worked,
Boulder would have used a now
decade old system known as WIA
or Wireless emergency alerts.
A system designed in theory to alert
every cell phone in a specific area.
The federal government calls
WEA an essential part of the
Americas emergency preparedness.
Shard admits the Marshall Fire was
bad and could have been worse.
Could have been.
Yeah,
absolutely you
know, night time would have
changed dynamic on this for sure.
I'm trying to see if we have
any reports of a fire there.
We have a bunch of fires
right now in Sonoma County, so
in 2017 the residents of
Sonoma County, California
he thinks she can't get out,
found out what can happen when
alerts failed to reach everyone. Fortunately,
we don't have the resources
to just go help her out,
so I'm gonna let them know she's there,
but I keep trying to call my mother.
So then she calls me
Jessica Tunis, spent part of that
October night. Listening to hell. So
I just am trying to.
I'm trying to reach you.
There's a big fire.
I don't know how I got that
sentence out without her.
The scream she's like my house is on fire.
My house is on fire I'm like.
What? It's like it's not computer
like there's no evacuation
notice for your neighborhood.
Like how did this happen? The
Tubbs fire destroyed 5000 homes killed 22.
Many never knew it was coming
and I said mom, you just you
gotta get to a window you got
you gotta jump you gotta do
something I'm like begging her,
begging her to please.
Jump out of the house and I I don't know.
I reverted to like
I reverted to a child I just started
telling her I love you Mommy.
I love you Mommy.
I haven't called her mommy since I was
probably 10 and I just realized this
is my last moments with my mother and
I just want to tell her I love her.
So that's what I did.
I I don't even know I just said
I love you mommy a lot of times.
And then she screamed.
And then the phone went dead.
Linda Tunis died in a county that also
had wiah, but chose not to use it at
that point in time. We was essentially
an untested system, and so they
elected not to use the WIA
system during that warning event,
Chris Godley came into
this office to change that
there was a failure of trust.
If you would, people felt let down
by their local government that the
government should have been able to
identify and warn them ahead of time.
He added staff just for WIA.
In the five years he's been here,
the county has now sent three
dozen WEA alerts. No one has died.
The public demands a level of
service that's not been seen before.
The cell phone is kind of how
we do business these days.
So if you're not making
use of that technology,
you may be disappointing your residents.
They've learned from their mistake 100%.
Jessica Tunis says now she loves her bingo.
She trusts the county where her mom died.
Ohh, I'm confident.
Yeah they are going to alert
yet in the country we are
remains underutilized.
We found in Colorado for example,
10 counties don't even have it.
Another five are still
working to set it up.
Remember Jane Fuller from Lewisville? I had
been on a trip a
couple years ago with my sisters
in Sonoma in the Sonoma area.
Yes, the same Sonoma County in
California and all three of us
received an evacuation notice
from being near a Fire Zone.
She learned the value
of those weird alerts.
So when smoke approached her
Colorado home late last year,
she thought another alert
would certainly come. That's
what I was expecting.
That's what I was waiting for.
A notification like the one I had
in California to say you need
to evacuate. Now I'm in Lewisville
and yet as you now know what
it never did. Since
the Marshall Fire, Boulder County
has finally turned on its WEA system,
I guess what I would tell them is
we've gotten better since this fire.
We've implemented this system.
We've used it already twice.
In fact, warnings Jane Fuller
welcomes in light of the day.
Too many were left in the dark. There's
no excuse. We assumed there would
have been an emergency alert.
You know, there needs to be some
kind of system that accesses
everybody and tells them what's
happening literally.
Millions of lives depend.
On the technologies here,
it's no longer a luxury
to have a cell phone.
This is how we live now,
and so we need to make sure these
systems can perform at that public
safety standard where people
have the same confidence that
they'll get those warnings as they
would if they had to call 911.