Investigation on why evacuation orders for fires were sent to people outside of impacted areas
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO)-- An investigation is underway to determine why evacuation orders reached outside of impacted areas during fires in El Paso County last week.
The El Paso and Teller County 9-1-1 Authority said it found three issues with the evacuation orders sent last Thursday through a wireless emergency alert system.
The first problem was that the alert was too broad, alerting people outside the evacuation zone, especially for the Akerman fire.
The emergency alert also didn't display a map of the evacuation zone -- just street names.
Thirdly, according to the 9-1-1 Authority, the alerts could have also been more informative about the location of the fires. The authority says it understands broad alerts like the one from the Akerman fire may have alarmed those unaffected, and they're working to figure out why it happened.
Public information officer Ben Bills said, in addition to the PEAK alert system the authority uses, which requires people to sign up for alerts, the alert system also utilized an additional notification, called Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS).
"IPAWS gives us additional functionality to where we can send notifications through TV and radio broadcasts. We can send it over weather radios, and then we can use a system that generates a technology called Wireless Emergency Alerts," Bills said. "[Those alerts] may have traveled outside of the impacted area that the notification was intended for and reached farther than we had intended."
While it cannot rule out human error yet, the authority is only using the PEAK alert system for now, which Bills adds has seen a massive boost in sign-ups since last week.
"We usually in a month get about 100. In the last five days, we've got about 6,300," he said. "Emergency usually sparks action, but I just ask [the public] go out today and then if you have elderly friends or relatives, check with your neighbors, make sure that they're all signed up."
