AI, GPS technology could help save lives in wildfires and floods

AP
AP

Summary

  • Destructive natural disasters add urgency to researchers’ efforts to find better ways to get warnings out fast, even in remote areas

New technology is on the way to assist in a growing public-safety problem: How to get people out of the way of wildfires, floods and other natural disasters.

The need to get emergency warnings out fast is rising as many researchers predict fires and storms will become more frequent and intense, fueled by climate change and other factors. Six of the 10 most costly Atlantic hurricanes in U.S. history have hit in the last decade, while seven of the top 10 most destructive wildfires in California have broken out over the same period.

Technology is evolving to meet the challenge. New apps are being developed to provide real-time information. Some agencies are starting to use satellites to relay wireless signals in remote terrain—a practice emergency managers expect to grow over the next decade in part because it reduces dependence on cellphone towers, also vulnerable in fires and storms.

“As we continue to see the effects of climate change affecting the severity of our disasters, they are not giving us as much time to warn people," said Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “The more we can advance the technology, the more quickly we can get this information out to the public."

For now, significant hurdles complicate alerts. One is the integrity of cellphone towers, which often fail in floods or fires. In Paradise, Calif., Jessamy Cartwright, 46, said she only learned of the Camp Fire bearing down in 2018 after seeing dark clouds of smoke outside the home where she was caring for her elderly mother. She said her mobile phone received no alerts because numerous cell towers were destroyed in the fire, which leveled the town and killed 84 people.

“Better warnings would have saved a lot of lives," said Ms. Cartwright, who managed to escape with her mother in a 1986 Dodge Ramcharger as flames descended onto her street.

Emergency managers say broadcasting alerts via social-media platforms over web browsers will become more common in the next few years, bypassing phone carriers and cell towers. This will happen as satellites are increasingly used to relay information, they say.

In August, the Department of Homeland Security completed a proof-of-concept test on an alert technology that would be sent directly from a satellite to the GPS navigation system of a car. That could prove life-saving, they say, because often people on the road aren’t in a position to notice an alert on their phones. GPS signals are beamed from the ground up to satellites, which relay them to receivers such as those in phones and automobiles. Such alerts could work even without cellular service and internet.

“This technology would be monumental in terms of ensuring that people who can’t access their phone (because they are driving) to read an alert, or aren’t at home to see or hear an alert, get the alert and can take immediate action," said Mary Jo Flynn-Nevins, chief of emergency services for Sacramento County, Calif.

Artificial-intelligence technology could also help. In the Pacific Northwest, Pascal Schuback, a local advocate for faster earthquake notifications, said he has been working with some companies and organizations to develop a way for Amazon Inc.’s Alexa virtual assistant to process emergency alerts. One possibility he sees is that, after an alert of imminent tremors, Alexa could direct the garage to open and a self-driving car to back out.

“This could be huge, because think of it—how many Alexa services are out there?" said Mr. Schuback, executive director of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup, a nonprofit that works with FEMA on quake preparedness.

An Amazon spokeswoman said no such feature currently exists on Alexa, but that customers can have it deliver notifications on local severe weather alerts, such as tornado warnings.

A slew of apps have come out recently to help people stay in better touch on disaster alerts. Among them are the FEMA App, which sends real-time emergency alerts from the National Weather Service, and Watch Duty, which gives instant updates on fires in California.

The technology behind warnings already has come a long way, but not without hiccups. Over the past two decades, emergency managers have rushed to deploy alert systems that rely on a mix of private and federal alert technologies, aimed at cellphones, email and landlines. One is known as an “opt-in" alert, which requires cellphone users to sign up to receive emergency notifications in their community. Landlines get automatic calls.

One of the biggest providers, Everbridge Inc., launched its opt-in system after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, initially as a mass-notification service that hadn’t existed before, said Tracy Reinhold, chief security officer of the Burlington, Mass., firm. The company has since expanded to offer alert services, of varying types, to states and towns for use during natural disasters.

“The goal is to provide early warning so people can seek shelter in advance of an event," Mr. Reinhold said.

Boulder County, Colo., used the Everbridge opt-in system during a rare winter wildfire that broke out Dec. 30 , destroying 1,084 homes and killing two people in the state’s most destructive fire in history. But many people didn’t receive the alerts because only about a third of the 325,000 county residents have opted in for the notifications, said Curtis Johnson, support services division chief for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. “The downside is that cellphone users have to actively sign up."

Everbridge says opt-in is just one of many alert services the company provides, such as Resident Connection, which provides officials a more complete database of people to notify.

In 2019 Boulder County officials had signed up for another technology, FEMA’s Integrated Alert and Warning System, which passes alerts to wireless service providers, who then transmit them to any cellphone within range of selected cell towers. But it put the new system on hold during the pandemic because of lack of resources, Mr. Johnson said, and just began using it in April. Everbridge also offers that technology.

The FEMA system, launched in 2012 to improve emergency communications after failures during Hurricane Katrina, helped evacuations ahead of 2021’s Hurricane Ida, which intensified from a category 1 storm to category 4 in the 24 hours before it slammed into the Louisiana coast, FEMA’s Ms. Criswell said.

It isn’t free of challenges. Mobile carriers figure out which cell towers will reach an area where an evacuation order needs to go so that local emergency officials can send out the alert. But many older phones—which account for around 40% of those in use in the U.S. according to the latest estimates by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association—lack a feature that allows them to correctly determine if the phone is inside the mapped area of the alert.

Simone Ramel-McKay discovered the problem with that when she deployed FEMA’s alert system in 2021 as program specialist for Spokane County Emergency Management in Washington state. “We have sent out alerts for fire evacuation and found out people who weren’t in the area were receiving them," Ms. Ramel-McKay said. “I thought, that’s kind of crazy."

Getting alerts where they aren’t intended can lead to people switching off their automatic emergency notifications, officials say. “It’s the car-alarm effect," said Brian Daly, an assistant vice president at AT&T. “If the alert isn’t meant for you, you tend to ignore the alert."

Even crafting messages for emergency alerts has had a learning curve. In the first few years of the FEMA alerts, they were confined to 90 characters—too short to convey critical information, such as where to evacuate, said Jeannette Sutton, an associate professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness at the University of Albany in Albany, N.Y. The FCC in 2019 expanded that to 360 characters, but another problem remains: alerts that are hard to understand, she said. “Not a lot of emergency managers have been trained in writing messages, and there needs to be more of that."

Ultimately, emergency managers will need to use a combination of approaches to make sure everybody in a disaster zone gets the word—including sheriff’s deputies going door-to-door, said Jennifer Gray Thompson, CEO of After the Fire USA, a California nonprofit that helps towns rebuild.

A survivor of Northern California’s 2017 Wine Country fires, which killed more than 30 people, she said rural communities, in particular, are vulnerable because of their remoteness and lack of cell towers. People living in high-risk areas can do their part, such as signing up for text alerts and downloading apps that track fires, Ms. Gray Thompson said. But she keeps one more tool on hand: old-fashioned two-way radios.

“There is not going to be one silver bullet for this," she said.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text

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