California’s Wildfires: Livestreams from Burning Homes and Dire Text Messages – Sometimes Erroneous
As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and “destroyed thousands of homes and other structures.” From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and “flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA’s busiest freeways.”
But the Atlantic’s assistant editor wrote Friday that “I have received 11 alerts. As far as I can tell, they were all sent in error.”
My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service….
Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent “due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires’ impacts on cellular towers” and announcing that the county’s emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California’s state alert system…
The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m. — on my phone.
At the same time a Los Angeles-area couple “spent two hours watching a live stream of flames closing in on their home,” reports the Washington Post, and at one point “saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard.”
At around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, [Zibby] Owens’s husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated. They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.
Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview Thursday that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home’s ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system. The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home’s destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighborhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
Soboroff also lost her home in the fire, the article adds. Burned to the ground are “the places where people raised their kids,” Zibby Owens wrote in this update posted Friday. But “even if my one home, or ‘structure’ as newscasters call it, happens to be mostly OK, I’ve still lost something I loved more than anything. We’ve all lost it… [M]y heart and soul are aching across the country as I sit alone in my office and try to make sense of the devastation.”
[I]t isn’t about our house.
It’s about our life.
Our feelings. Our community. Our memories. Our beloved stores, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, neighbors. It’s about the homes where we sat at friends’ kitchen tables and played Uno, celebrated their birthdays, and truly connected.
It’s all gone… [E]very single person I know and so many I don’t who live in the Palisades have lost everything. Not just one or two friends. Everyone.
And then I saw video footage of our beloved village. The yogurt shop and Beach Street? Gone. Paliskates, our kids’ favorite store? Gone. Burned to the ground.
Gelson’s grocery store, where we just recently picked up the New York Post and groceries for the break? Gone…
The. Whole. Town.
How? How is it possible?
How could everyone have lost everything? Schools, homes, power, cell service, cars, everything. All their belongings…
All the schools, gone. It’s unthinkable….
I’ve worked in the local library and watched the July 4 parade from streets that are now smoldering embers…
It is an unspeakable loss.
“Everyone I know in the Palisades has lost all of their possessions,” the author writes, publishing what appear to be text messages from friends.
“It’s gone.”
“We lost everything.”
“Nothing left.”
“We lost it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and “destroyed thousands of homes and other structures.” From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and “flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA’s busiest freeways.”
But the Atlantic’s assistant editor wrote Friday that “I have received 11 alerts. As far as I can tell, they were all sent in error.”
My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service….
Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent “due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires’ impacts on cellular towers” and announcing that the county’s emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California’s state alert system…
The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m. — on my phone.
At the same time a Los Angeles-area couple “spent two hours watching a live stream of flames closing in on their home,” reports the Washington Post, and at one point “saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard.”
At around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, [Zibby] Owens’s husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated. They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.
Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview Thursday that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home’s ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system. The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home’s destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighborhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
Soboroff also lost her home in the fire, the article adds. Burned to the ground are “the places where people raised their kids,” Zibby Owens wrote in this update posted Friday. But “even if my one home, or ‘structure’ as newscasters call it, happens to be mostly OK, I’ve still lost something I loved more than anything. We’ve all lost it… [M]y heart and soul are aching across the country as I sit alone in my office and try to make sense of the devastation.”
[I]t isn’t about our house.
It’s about our life.
Our feelings. Our community. Our memories. Our beloved stores, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, neighbors. It’s about the homes where we sat at friends’ kitchen tables and played Uno, celebrated their birthdays, and truly connected.
It’s all gone… [E]very single person I know and so many I don’t who live in the Palisades have lost everything. Not just one or two friends. Everyone.
And then I saw video footage of our beloved village. The yogurt shop and Beach Street? Gone. Paliskates, our kids’ favorite store? Gone. Burned to the ground.
Gelson’s grocery store, where we just recently picked up the New York Post and groceries for the break? Gone…
The. Whole. Town.
How? How is it possible?
How could everyone have lost everything? Schools, homes, power, cell service, cars, everything. All their belongings…
All the schools, gone. It’s unthinkable….
I’ve worked in the local library and watched the July 4 parade from streets that are now smoldering embers…
It is an unspeakable loss.
“Everyone I know in the Palisades has lost all of their possessions,” the author writes, publishing what appear to be text messages from friends.
“It’s gone.”
“We lost everything.”
“Nothing left.”
“We lost it.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.