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The Changli is weird, about $1,000, and a surprisingly compelling vision of the future.

If you’re trying to solve a problem, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to look over your efforts, scribble things on a pad, scowl, and then say, “Have you tried half-assing it? Really phone it in?” This almost never happens. And yet it's precisely what I think needs to happen for electric cars to live up to their potential. They need to suck far, far more than they currently do. I know this sounds like what many experts would call “a terrible idea” and “stupid,” but I’m confident in this belief for one very notable reason: I’ve lived it.
For the past few years, I’ve used and enjoyed an electric car that is, by the standards of any EV available on the mass market today, terrible. I’m talking about something with about 1/10th the range, about 1/250th the horsepower (and that’s being generous), and maybe 1/5th the maximum speed of a modern EV. These are the sort of specs that should be charitably considered garbage.
And yet, despite it all, what I’ve learned is that not only are such meager capabilities enough for a shocking amount of my transportation needs, the whole experience has been downright fun. Yes, fun.
The car I’m talking about is called the Changli Freeman, and I believe it is the cheapest car in the world. In fact, that was the initial reason I bought it. You see, my job is to write about and do things with interesting cars, so when the pandemic arrived in 2020, that put a real crimp in my usual plans of traveling to people with strange cars all over the country and driving them, on video, to the delight of audiences in the high severals.
So, stuck at home, I hatched a new plan: I’d bring the interesting cars to me! Well, one interesting car, and that interesting car would be the cheapest new car one could buy.
My research brought me to a category of automobile that is known in their native land, China, as 老头乐, something that translates to “old man happy car.” That’s because this type of car is primarily sold to elderly folks in second-tier cities who need something to get to the market or pick up grandkids from school. Slow is just fine, and the legality of these cars, even in their native China, is muddy, at best. But they are definitely cars, of a sort.
At $930, the Changli was the cheapest of the cheap. Add in the necessary five 12V lead-acid batteries, which aren’t included in the base price, and the bill lurches up to $1,200, still absolutely, impossibly, floor-settingly dirt cheap for a new car of any kind.
Oh, and perhaps equally incredibly, I found this car on the website Alibaba.com, and bought it online, just like you would buy a video game console that looks like a Playstation 5 but perversely only plays 40-year-old Nintendo games.
Sure, shipping from China and all of the related customs hassles brought the total cost to about $3,300, but even so, we’re still talking about something wildly inexpensive. We’re still comfortably lying down on that bottom tier, and if you need further proof of this, here’s a video of me when I first got it and had to take it out of the massive cardboard box it shipped in:
Unboxing The World's Cheapest New Car Reveals It's So Much Better Than You Thinkwww.youtube.com
Now, aside from the fact that my new car arrived in a cardboard box, what you should note is my raw, unmitigated delight.
I had been genuinely ready to accept what would effectively be a plastic porta-potty-type body on a crude, flimsy chassis with a chain-driven axle and an effective operational lifespan roughly on par with your average mosquito. But that’s not what I got. What I got was a very cleverly-designed little car with an all-steel body, all the required legal lights and indicators, a windshield wiper, heater, radio with an MP3 player, and even a freaking backup camera. It was so much better than I ever could have imagined.
I later brought the Changli to Munro and Associates, one of the leading vehicular evaluation companies in the world, a place where major automotive manufacturers bring competitors' products to determine how they’re built and how much it costs to make them.
Sandy Munro, who runs the company, was genuinely stunned by what the Changli had to offer, and how it was made:
Sandy Munro Attempts To Demystify The Absurdly Low Cost Of The Changliwww.youtube.com
Remember, these are the reactions of someone who has torn down every major electric car on the market, from Teslas to Fords to BMWs. He knows what he’s talking about.
The specs on the car aren’t exactly impressive: 1.1 horsepower electric motor, 60V of batteries which gave a (tested) range of 27 miles, and a top speed of about 25 mph or so, though something around 20 was more common. My kid is able to run up a hill faster than the Changli can get up it. And yet, somehow, it works.
Here's What The World's Cheapest Electric Car Is Like To Drivewww.youtube.com
It actually does more than just work; it’s a usable transportation solution for far more of my normal transportation needs than I’d have ever guessed. While it may have come into my life as a curio, it very rapidly became an actually useful conveyance.
I used it to go to the grocery store. I sometimes took my kid to school in it, or to a friend’s house. I picked up take-out. I got parts from the auto parts store when one or more of my “real” cars needed repair. I met friends out at restaurants or galleries or clubs in town, and when I did, I could always park where no one else could, nose-to-curb or in tiny nooks behind dumpsters or any number of other small, forgotten spaces.
I did all of the sorts of mundane, low-distance, low-speed personal transportation acts that we all do, and which command a far larger percentage of our day-to-day transportation needs than many of us realize.
Now, I live in an environment where this sort of thing is perhaps unusually possible. It’s a college town, so there’s a lot of fairly dense commerce surrounded by a lot of low-speed streets, which makes it ideal for using a low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle (as it’s technically classed). According to the rules of this vehicle classification, which varies a lot from state-to-state, I can drive my absurd little machine on any street with a speed limit of 35 mph or less, though I think I can cross streets with higher limits.
There’s no highway travel, of course, but that’s not a restriction I’d need to be told to obey, as trying to drive this thing on a highway would be like shoving a sloth into the path of a cattle stampede. Were I to be in an accident with something like an F-150, I’d probably end up accordian’d like a cartoon coyote.
What I learned was that about 75% of my daily transportation needs could be accomplished with this shockingly minimal machine, and, even better, done with more fun than getting in a full-sized car. It was even easier than driving my regular cars! It was quiet and leisurely and everyone who saw this refugee from Cartoonistan greeted it with amused bewilderment or a smile or both.
Compared to a real EV like, say, a Tesla Model 3, this thing is a joke. But it’s a joke that can get to and from the grocery store in about the same amount of time when driving through town, and accomplish pretty much the same job, for a tiny fraction of the price and without hauling around an extra 3,000 pounds of car and battery that were, for the purposes of a trip like a grocery run, just dead weight.
There’s something in the automotive industry known as “vehicle demand energy,” which basically refers to the amount of energy needed to simply put the whole car in motion. The vehicle demand energy of a Tesla or a Ford Mach-E or even a Nissan Leaf is orders of magnitude higher than what the Changli demands, and for an awful lot of driving, that’s wasted energy.
If we’re really serious about using EVs to make a real dent in climate issues and energy usage, then we should adjust our thinking to make room for Changli-type vehicles.
Side by side with a “real car,” the Changli looks like a comical, shrunken subset, but compared to other minimalistic electric, low-speed transportation solutions like an e-bike, it feels like being carried in a luxurious, silken-draped litter. Unlike an e-bike, you’re still enjoying complete protection from the weather, and since you’re not teetering on a pair of wheels, but are rather cozily lounging inside a metal box, you can carry so much more stuff.
That’s why a minimal car-esque EV like the Changli is viable for transporting, say, tubs of Chinese food home or taking your kid to school: It’s a car, not a bike. It’s an obvious thing to note, but it’s a big deal when it comes to actually using the thing.
Sure, you can’t take a roadtrip in a Changli, but you knew that from the moment you looked at it. It is just a case of the right tool for the right job. Live somewhere dense, with a lot of low-speed travel? Maybe a Changli makes sense! Live on a compound and it’s a 45-minute trip if you need dental floss? Maybe not. There will always be a place for long-range, comfortable and safe EVs, capable of high speeds and long road trips, but they don’t need to be your daily driver.
Perhaps many of us will have small, fun, a-bit-better-than-Changli-type vehicles that we drive day-to-day, and then take majestic powerful, long-range EVs on the occasional road trip.
This doesn’t have to be a punishment. I’m a gearhead, I love cars and driving, and I can honestly say my driving experiences in the Changli have been a blast. I even took it to a track event. I’m pretty sure I hit 26 mph, and, like any car at its limit, it was pretty fun, making those bagel-sized tires squeal and feeling that tall, silly body lean and tilt like a drunk on an escalator.
Already in Europe we’re starting to see some realization that this sort of category is viable; French carmaker Citroën has a cheap, $10,000-ish car called the Ami that is classified under European quadracycle laws, which is essentially a category for low-speed city cars, which make a lot of sense the dense urban landscapes found all over Europe.
The Ami’s speed is limited to 28 mph (I suspect it’s technically capable of more), and it can go about 47 miles on a full charge, both of which are enough for the job it’s designed to do. The more I think about cars like the Changli and the Ami, the more I think they should be far, far more common than they are.
If we want to really change the transportation landscape in a way that’s good for the climate, is less demanding on the difficult rare-earth resources required to make EV batteries (for the resources that go into the battery of one full-range and power EV, you can likely make at least three short-range-use EVs), and yet still preserves so much of the personal transportation freedom that we’ve all grown to expect, then its time to really think about scaling down the sorts of vehicles that we use for all the little drives we do.
And, remember, it’s not a punishment. It’ll be fun. I know, because, again, I’m doing it, in the most minimal, ridiculous way possible.
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On China’s rare earths, Bill Gates’ nuclear dream, and Texas renewables
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa exploded in intensity over the warm Caribbean waters and has now strengthened into a major storm, potentially slamming into Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica as a Category 5 in the coming days • The Northeast is bracing for a potential nor’easter, which will be followed by a plunge in temperatures of as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average • The northern Australian town of Julia Creek saw temperatures soar as high as 106 degrees.
Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against California late Friday on the grounds that two landmark new climate laws violate the oil giant’s free speech rights, The New York Times reported. The two laws would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas pollution created by the use of their products, so-called Scope 3 emissions. “The statutes compel Exxon Mobil to trumpet California’s preferred message even though Exxon Mobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided,” Exxon complained through its lawyers. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office said the statutes “have already been upheld in court and we continue to have confidence in them.” He condemned the lawsuit, calling it “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
China will delay introducing export controls on rare earths, an unnamed U.S. official told the Financial Times following two days of talks in Malaysia. For years, Beijing has been ratcheting up trade restrictions on the global supply of metals its industry dominates. But this month, China slapped the harshest controls yet on rare earths. In response, stocks in rare earth mining and refining companies soared. Despite what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the “paradox of Trump’s critical mineral crusade” to mine even as he reduced demand from electric vehicle factories, “everybody wants to invest in critical minerals startups,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote. That — as frequent readers of this newsletter will recall — includes the federal government, which under the Trump administration has been taking equity stakes in major projects as part of deals for federal funding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission rewarded Bill Gates’ next-generation reactor company, TerraPower, with its final environment impact statement last week. The next step in the construction permit process is a final safety evaluation that the company expects to receive by the end of this year. If everything goes according to plan, TerraPower could end up winning the race to build the nation’s first commercial reactor to use a coolant other than water, and do so at a former coal-fired plant in the country’s top coal-producing state. “The Natrium plant in Wyoming, Kemmerer Unit 1, is now the first advanced reactor technology to successfully complete an environmental impact statement for the NRC, bringing us another step closer to delivering America’s next nuclear power plant,” said TerraPower president and CEO Chris Levesque.
A judge gave New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration until February 6 to issue rules for its long-delayed cap-and-invest program, the Albany Times-Union reported. The government was supposed to issue the guidelines that would launch the program as early as 2024, but continuously pushed back the release. “Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote in January.

The Texas data center boom is being powered primarily with new wind, solar, and batteries, according to new analysis by the Energy Information Administration. Since 2021, electricity demand on the independent statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has soared. Over the past year, wind, solar, and batteries have been supplying that rising demand. Utility-scale solar generated 45 terawatt-hours of electricity in the first nine months of 2025. That’s 50% more than the same period in 2024 and nearly four times more than the same period in 2021. Wind generation, meanwhile, totaled 87 terawatt-hours for the first nine months of this year, up 4% from last year and 36% since 2021. “Together,” the analysis stated, “wind and solar generation met 36% of ERCOT’s electricity demand in the first nine months of 2025.”
The question isn’t whether the flames will come — it’s when, and what it will take to recover.
In the two decades following the turn of the millennium, wildfires came within three miles of an estimated 21.8 million Americans’ homes. That number — which has no doubt grown substantially in the five years since — represents about 6% of the nation’s population, including the survivors of some of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the country’s history. But it also includes millions of stories that never made headlines.
For every Paradise, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii, there were also dozens of uneventful evacuations, in which regular people attempted to navigate the confusing jargon of government notices and warnings. Others lost their homes in fires that were too insignificant to meet the thresholds for federal aid. And there are countless others who have decided, after too many close calls, to move somewhere else.
By any metric, costly, catastrophic, and increasingly urban wildfires are on the rise. Nearly a third of the U.S. population, however, lives in a county with a high or very high risk of wildfire, including over 60% of the counties in the West. But the shape of the recovery from those disasters in the weeks and months that follow is often that of a maze, featuring heart-rending decisions and forced hands. Understanding wildfire recovery is critical, though, for when the next disaster follows — which is why we’ve set out to explore the topic in depth.
The most immediate concerns for many in the weeks following a wildfire are financial. Homeowners are still required to pay the mortgage on homes that are nothing more than piles of ash — one study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that 90-day delinquencies rose 4% and prepayments rose 16% on properties that were damaged by wildfires. Because properties destroyed in fires often receive insurance settlements that are lower than the cost to fully replace their home, “households face strong incentives to apply insurance funds toward the mortgage balance instead of rebuilding, and the observed increase in prepayment represents a symptom of broader frictions in insurance markets that leave households with large financial losses in the aftermath of a natural disaster,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, many people who believed they had adequate insurance only discover after a fire that their coverage limits are lower than 75% of their home’s actual replacement costs, putting them in the category of the underinsured. Homeowners still grappling with the loss of their residence and possessions are also left to navigate reams of required paperwork to get their money, a project one fire victim likened to having a “part-time job.” It’s not uncommon for fire survivors to wait months or even years for payouts, or to find that necessary steps to rebuilding, such as asbestos testing and dead tree removals, aren’t covered. Just last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law requiring insurers to pay at least 60% of a homeowner’s personal property coverage on a total loss without a detailed inventory, up to $350,000. The original proposal called for a 100% payout, but faced intense insurance industry blowback .
Even if your home doesn’t burn to the ground, you might be affected by the aftermath of a nearby fire. In California, a fifth of homes in the highest-risk wildfire areas have lost insurance coverage since 2019, while premiums in those same regions have increased by 42%. Insurers’ jitters have overflowedspilled over into other Western states like Washington, where there are fewer at-risk properties than in California — 16% compared to 41% — but premiums have similarly doubled in some cases due to the perceived hazardrisks.
Some experts argue that people should be priced out of the wildland-urban interface and that managed retreat will help prevent future tragedies. But as I report in my story on fire victims who’ve decided not to rebuild, that’s easier said than done. There are only three states where insured homeowners have the legal right to replace a wildfire-destroyed home by buying a new property instead of rebuilding, meaning many survivors end up shackled to a property that is likely to burn again.
The financial maze, of course, is only one aspect of recovery — the physical and mental health repercussions can also reverberate for years. A study that followed survivors of Australia’s Black Saturday bush fires in 2009, which killed over 170 people, found that five years after the disaster, a fifth of survivors still suffered from “serious mental health challenges” like post-traumatic stress disorder. In Lahaina, two years after the fire, nearly half of the children aged 10 to 17 who survived are suspected of coping with PTSD.
Federal firefighting practices continue to focus on containing fires as quickly as possible, to the detriment of less showy but possibly more effective solutions such as prescribed burns and limits on development in fire-prone areas. Some of this is due to the long history of fire suppression in the West, but it persists due to ongoing political and public pressure. Still, you can find small and promising steps forward for forest management in places like Paradise, where the recreation and park district director has scraped together funds to begin to build a buffer between an ecosystem that is meant to burn and survivors of one of the worst fires in California’s history.
In the four pieces that follow, I’ve attempted to explore the challenges of wildfire recovery in the weeks and months after the disaster itself. In doing so, I’ve spoken to firefighters, victims, researchers, and many others to learn more about what can be done to make future recoveries easier and more effective.
The bottom line, though, is that there is no way to fully prevent wildfires. We have to learn to live alongside them, and that means recovering smarter, too. It’s not the kind of glamorous work that attracts TV cameras and headlines; often, the real work of recovery occurs in the many months after the fire is extinguished. But it also might just make the difference.
Wildfire evacuation notices are notoriously confusing, and the stakes are life or death. But how to make them better is far from obvious.
How many different ways are there to say “go”? In the emergency management world, it can seem at times like there are dozens.
Does a “level 2” alert during a wildfire, for example, mean it’s time to get out? How about a “level II” alert? Most people understand that an “evacuation order” means “you better leave now,” but how is an “evacuation warning” any different? And does a text warning that “these zones should EVACUATE NOW: SIS-5111, SIS-5108, SIS-5117…” even apply to you?
As someone who covers wildfires, I’ve been baffled not only by how difficult evacuation notices can be to parse, but also by the extent to which they vary in form and content across the United States. There is no centralized place to look up evacuation information, and even trying to follow how a single fire develops can require hopping among jargon-filled fire management websites, regional Facebook pages, and emergency department X accounts — with some anxious looking-out-the-window-at-the-approaching-pillar-of-smoke mixed in.
Google and Apple Maps don’t incorporate evacuation zone data. Third-party emergency alert programs have low subscriber rates, and official government-issued Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEAs — messages that trigger a loud tone and vibration to all enabled phones in a specific geographic region — are often delayed, faulty, or contain bad information, none of which is ideal in a scenario where people are making life-or-death decisions. The difficulty in accessing reliable information during fast-moving disasters like wildfires is especially aggravating when you consider that nearly everyone in America owns a smartphone, i.e. a portal to all the information in the world.
So why is it still so hard to learn when and where specific evacuation notices are in place, or if they even apply to you? The answer comes down to the decentralized nature of emergency management in the United States.
A downed power line sparks a fire on a day with a Red Flag Warning. A family driving nearby notices the column of smoke and calls to report it to 911. The first responders on the scene realize that the winds are fanning the flames toward a neighborhood, and the sheriff decides to issue a wildfire warning, communicating to the residents that they should be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She radios her office — which is now fielding multiple calls asking for information about the smoke column — and asks for the one person in the office that day with training on the alert system to compose the message.
Scenarios like these are all too common. “The people who are put in the position of issuing the messages are doing 20 other things at the same time,” Jeannette Sutton, a researcher at the University at Albany’s Emergency and Risk Communication Message Testing Lab, told me. “They might have limited training and may not have had the opportunity to think about what the messages might contain — and then they’re told by an incident commander, Send this, and they’re like, Oh my God, what do I do?”
The primary way of issuing wildfire alerts is through WEAs, with 78,000 messages sent since 2012. Although partnerships between local emergency management officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and cellular and internet providers facilitate the technology, it’s local departments that determine the actual content of the message. Messaging limits force some departments to condense the details of complicated and evolving fire events into 90 characters or fewer. Typos, confusing wording, and jargon inevitably abound.
Emergency management teams often prefer to err on the side of sending too few messages rather than too many for fear of inducing information overload. “We’re so attached to our devices, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or text messages, that it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak — to make sure that we are getting the right information out there,” John Rabin, the vice president of disaster management at the consulting firm ICF International and a former assistant administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told me. “One of the challenges for local and state governments is how to bring [pertinent information] up and out, so that when they send those really important notifications for evacuations, they really resonate.”
But while writing an emergency alert is a bit of an art, active prose alone doesn’t ensure an effective evacuation message.
California’s Cal Fire has found success with the “Ready, Set, Go” program, designed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, which uses an intuitive traffic light framework — “ready” is the prep work of putting together a go-bag and waiting for more news if a fire is in the vicinity, escalating to the “go” of the actual evacuation order. Parts of Washington and Oregon use similar three-tiered systems of evacuation “levels” ranging from 1 to 3. Other places, like Montana, rely on two-step “evacuation warnings” and “evacuation orders.”
Watch Duty, a website and app that surged in popularity during the Los Angeles fires earlier this year, doesn’t worry about oversharing. Most information on Watch Duty comes from volunteers, who monitor radio scanners, check wildfire cameras, and review official law enforcement announcements, then funnel the information to the organization’s small staff, who vet it before posting. Though WatchDuty volunteers and staff — many of whom are former emergency managers or fire personnel themselves — actively review and curate the information on the app, the organization still publishes far more frequent and iterative updates than most people are used to seeing and interpreting. As a result, some users and emergency managers have criticized Watch Duty for having too much information available, as a result.
The fact that Watch Duty was downloaded more than 2 million times during the L.A. fires, though, would seem to testify to the fact that people really are hungry for information in one easy-to-locate place. The app is now available in 22 states, with more than 250 volunteers working around the clock to keep wildfire information on the app up to date. John Clarke Mills, the app’s CEO and co-founder, has said he created the app out of “spite” over the fact that the government doesn’t have a better system in place for keeping people informed on wildfires.
“I’ve not known too many situations where not having information makes it better,” Katlyn Cummings, the community manager at Watch Duty, told me. But while the app’s philosophy is “rooted in transparency and trust with our users,” Cummings stressed to me that the app’s volunteers only use official and public sources of information for their updates and never include hearsay, separating it from other crowd-sourced community apps that have proved to be less than reliable.
Still, it takes an army of a dozen full-time staff and over 200 part-time volunteers, plus an obsessively orchestrated Slack channel to centralize the wildfire and evacuation updates — which might suggest why a more official version doesn’t exist yet, either from the government or a major tech company. Google Maps currently uses AI to visualize the boundaries of wildfires, but stops short of showing users the borders of local evacuation zones (though it will route you around known road closures). A spokesperson for Google also pointed me toward a feature in Maps that shares news articles, information from local authorities, and emergency numbers when users are in “the immediate vicinity” of an actively unfolding natural disaster — a kind of do-it-yourself Watch Duty. The company declined to comment on the record about why Maps specifically excludes evacuation zones. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
There is, of course, a major caveat to the usefulness of Watch Duty.
Users of the app tend to be a self-selecting group of hyper-plugged-in digital natives who are savvy enough to download it or otherwise know to visit the website during an unfolding emergency. As Rabin, the former FEMA official, pointed out, Watch Duty users aren’t the population that first responders are most concerned about — they’re like “Boy Scouts,” he said, because they’re “always prepared.” They’re the ones who already know what’s going on. “It’s reaching the folks that aren’t paying attention that is the big challenge,” he told me.
The older adult population is the most vulnerable in cases of wildfire. Death tolls often skew disproportionately toward the elderly; of the 30 people who died in the Los Angeles fires in January, for example, all but two were over 60 or disabled, with the average age of the deceased 77, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Part of that is because adults 65 and older are more likely to have physical impairments that make quick or unplanned evacuations challenging. Social and technological isolation are also factors — yes, almost everyone in America has a smartphone, but that includes just 80% of those 65 and older, and only 26% of the older adult population feels “very confident” using computers or smartphones. According to an extensive 2024 report on how extreme weather impacts older adults by CNA, an independent, nonprofit research organization, “Evacuation information, including orders, is not uniformly communicated in ways and via media that are accessible to older adults or those with access and functional needs.”
Sutton, the emergency warning researcher, also cautioned that more information isn’t always better. Similar to the way scary medical test results might appear in a health portal before a doctor has a chance to review them with you (and calm you down), wildfire information shared without context or interpretation from emergency management officials means the public is “making assumptions based upon what they see on Watch Duty without actually having those official messages coming from the public officials who are responsible for issuing those messages,” she said. One role of emergency managers is to translate the raw, on-the-ground information into actionable guidance. Absent that filter, panic is probable, which could lead to uncontrollable evacuation traffic or exacerbate alert fatigue. Alternatively, people might choose to opt out of future alerts or stop checking for updates.
Sutton, though she’s a strong advocate of creating standardized language for emergency alerts — “It would be wonderful if we had consistent language that was agreed upon” between departments, she told me — was ultimately skeptical of centralizing the emergency alert system under a large agency like FEMA. “The movement of wildfires is so fast, and it requires knowledge of the local communities and the local terrain as well as meteorological knowledge,” she said. “Alerts and warnings really should be local.”
The greater emphasis, Sutton stressed, should be on providing emergency managers with the training they need to communicate quickly, concisely, and effectively with the tools they already have.
The high wire act of emergency communications, though, is that while clear and regionally informed messages are critical during life-or-death situations, it also falls on residents in fire-risk areas to be ready to receive them. California first adopted the “Ready, Set, Go” framework in 2009, and it has spent an undisclosed amount of money over the years on a sustained messaging blitz to the public. (Cal Fire’s “land use planning and public education budget is estimated at $16 million, and funds things like the updated ad spots it released as recently as this August.) Still, there is evidence that even that has not been enough — and Cal Fire is the best-resourced firefighting agency in the country, setting the gold standard for an evacuation messaging campaign.
Drills and test messages are one way to bring residents up to speed, but participation is typically very low. Many communities and residents living in wildfire-risk areas continue to treat the threat with low urgency — something to get around to one day. But whether they’re coming from your local emergency management department or the White House itself, emergency notices are only as effective as the public is willing and able to heed them.