Several improvements have been made to the alert and warning systems in Boulder County in the aftermath of the Marshall Fire.
According to the sheriff’s office, some changes were already being worked on prior to the fire and some updates have been made since the fire that destroyed over 1,000 homes on Dec. 30, 2021.
“Since the Marshall Fire, there has been a tremendous amount of effort put towards making sure we can warn the community when there is an emergency,” Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson said. “The collaborative approach to this work has created a system that can work across jurisdictional boundaries.”
The fast-moving disaster highlighted some of the issues with voluntary 911 programs used in many communities. A Colorado Sun report found that the first phone alert to Boulder County residents about the Marshall Fire was sent 42 minutes after flames broke out and only to 215 people initially.
In April 2022, Longmont, Boulder and Boulder County completed implementation of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, the sheriff’s office said.
The system allows 911 staff to send notification for imminent life threats through wireless emergency alerts, much like how Amber Alerts are issued, along with the Emergency Alert System on radio and television and NOAA Weather Radios at the request of local law enforcement and fire personnel.
Boulder County acquired the technology before the fire but had not finished setting it up when the Marshall Fire occurred, according to the Colorado Sun. The report also said that 24,000 evacuation alerts were sent during the fire, but fewer than one in five were confirmed to have been received.
The sheriff’s office noted that Everbride, the software used to send emergency alerts to landlines, cell phones, text and emails, has also been updated. Everbridge Resident Connect has been added to Boulder County’s package plan, which is a database of publicly sourced information that aggregates residential and business phone numbers that can be used to send out emergency alerts in impacted areas.
Phone numbers in this database will automatically receive text messages and voice alerts when an emergency alert is sent, but the sheriff’s office emphasized that it is not a substitute for opting into messages. Community members who are not already registered for Everbridge are encouraged to sign up for emergency alerts by going to www.BOCOAlert.org.
Emergency alert messages and an interactive map are now automatically posted to the www.BOCOAlert.org website anytime an emergency alert is sent in Boulder County using this software with a web address to access more information.
Following the Marshall Fire, Boulder County law and fire agencies collaborated to develop consistent policies and practices for launching emergency alerts regardless of jurisdictional boundaries. Planning sessions and tabletop exercises were held with first responders from Boulder, Larimer, Weld and Broomfield counties.
According to the sheriff’s office, these experiences allowed officials to work through potential issues and streamline business processes in the event an incident crossed county lines. The partnerships all use the same alerting technology.
For outdoor warning sirens, somehow been reprogrammed according to each community’s preference of when sirens may be utilized — like during wildfires.
Public safety officials have developed pre-defined alerting areas for the entire county to help first responders quickly communicate the location of alert distribution to their 911 center. While the western half of the county already had the areas identified, now the entire county is complete.
Language access has also been improved, with the ReachWell translation app now available to download and receive emergency alerts in over 100 languages and dialects. All alerts are automatically sent to the app, where users can access the content in their preferred language.
Google Translate is available on all www.BoulderOEM.com web pages, available from the dropdown menu to select a preferred language.
All Wireless Emergency Alerts messages will be translated for community members and visitors that set their mobile device preferred language to Spanish.
