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The former Department of Energy chief commercialization officer talks about the public sector’s role in catalyzing new clean energy.

Vanessa Chan didn’t think she had the right temperament to work in government. After a 13-year stint as a partner at McKinsey, six years as a partner at the angel investment firm Robin Hood Ventures, and four years at the University of Pennsylvania, most recently as professor of practice in innovation and entrepreneurship, Chan considered herself to be an impatient, get-it-done type — anathema to the traditionally slow, procedurally complex work of governing.
But the Energy Act of 2020 had just formalized a new role within the Department of Energy ideally suited to her skills: Chief Commercialization Officer, which would also serve as the director of the Office of Technology Transitions. Who would fill these dual roles was to be the decision of then-incoming Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who found a kindred spirit in Chan. Under her leadership, Chan told me, “I found someone who’s less patient than me.”
In her four years at the DOE, the OTT’s annual budget — which she referred to as “literally a rounding error to most people” — grew from $12.6 million to $56.6 million. She leveraged it to its fullest extent, establishing a precedent for the potential of this small but mighty office. Chan spearheaded the “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff” reports that provide investors with a path to market for the most important decarbonization technologies, and announced over $41 million in funding for 50 clean energy projects across all of the nations 17 national labs through the Technology Commercialization Fund.
She also changed the way the DOE, national labs, venture capitalists, and startups alike talk about getting ready for primetime with the Adoption Readiness Level framework, which put a much-needed focus on factors such as economic viability, regulatory hurdles, and supply chain constraints in the same way that the established Technology Readiness Levels, pioneered by NASA, focus on the question of whether a technology actually works.
Now Chan is back at the University of Pennsylvania in a new, extremely apt role: the Inaugural Vice-Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She’s weaving lessons learned from her time in the public and private sectors into academia, where her goal is to help incorporate real-world skills into the education of engineers and PhD scholars to prime them for maximum impact upon graduation.
“It’s such a disservice if you invent something and it never sees the light of day,” she told me. “So we need to make sure that isn’t happening and we increase our odds of things making it to the market.”
Over two separate interviews, one before President Trump’s inauguration and one after, I asked Chan how her work with the DOE has helped climate technologies move from the lab to the market, the challenges that remain, and what to keep an eye on in the new administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get recruited for this job? Was government work even on your radar before?
No, this was never on my vision board. But the way in which this came about was in 2016, there was a workshop that was being led by DOE on a potential new foundation that was going to be focused on commercialization. And one of my former clients told the person running the workshop, if you’re talking about technology commercialization, you have to talk to Vanessa Chan. And when I was there, I just yapped off about all the issues that I see with commercialization and what the federal government should be doing about it. And I didn’t think anything of it.
And then fast forward to 2020, I get this cryptic email saying, “Hey, the Biden-Harris administration is interested in you.” I spent all the time during the interview [with the Biden-Harris team] going, “Here’s my thing about commercialization, but I don’t think you guys want me, because I’m someone who works really fast. I have no patience for bureaucracy. I like to disrupt. I don’t like the status quo.” And they’re like, that’s exactly what we want.
How did the DOE, and the OTT in particular, really undergo a shift in the Biden administration?
Historically, DOE has been very focused on research and development. And then when the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] and [Inflation Reduction Act] got passed, now there was half-a-trillion dollars going towards demonstration and deployment, and it became a lot more fun being the chief commercialization officer.
The mantra that we’ve had is that the clean energy transition — and quite frankly, commercialization — has to be private sector-led but government-enabled. Because in the end, it’s the private sector that’s actually commercializing. It’s not the government. DOD can buy stuff to bring things to market, but DOE, we’re an enabler. And unless the private sector has sustainable, viable economic models, nothing will ever be commercialized.
How does your work intersect with other DOE agencies that are focused on commercialization, like the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office?
I worked very closely with all of them. In particular, one of the things that was really important to do was to get us on the same page of what it actually means to deploy technologies. So I quarterbacked an effort called the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff, which OCED, LPO, and any program office that was touching research, development, demonstration, and deployment was a part of.
If we use hydrogen hubs as an example, OCED was given $8 billion towards hydrogen. When we did the hydrogen liftoff report, what we found was a few things. One is that electrolyzer costs are super high, and so we have to be able to drive those downward to make the unit economics work. We have an issue where there is no midstream infrastructure. We also had a chicken-and-the egg, which is pretty classic: No one wants to buy hydrogen until the supply chain is stood up, [but] the supply chain doesn’t want to stand up until they know they actually have offtake agreements.
What we did with OCED was, we took $7 billion to invest in seven hydrogen hubs across the nation, and then we reserved $1 billion to create an offtake demand mechanism. And that’s the first time ever that the federal government has actually focused on a demand activation program.
Have these liftoff reports been well received on both sides of the aisle? Do you think they’ll continue to be referenced in the new administration?
We were very, very, very fact-driven. There’s no policy by design, because in the end it’s all about, what does it take for a technology to make sense, for it to be in the market? So it’s not Republican or Democratic, it’s just — what does the private sector have to do? I’m really hoping they’re not seen as partisan and really more a synthesis of what’s required for the private sector to actually scale technology.
What are some additional successes from your time at the DOE?
An example program is MAKE IT, which is Manufacturing of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies, which was a program that we created with OCED in order to figure out ways in which we could try to help bolster manufacturing across the nation. We also have this program called EPIC, the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters, and we have funded over 80 incubators and accelerators across the nation, which are supporting startups.
We’ve created a voucher program for startups and smaller organizations — sometimes there’s very tactical things that they need help on, and they need a small dollar amount, like a couple-hundred-thousand-dollars to tackle that. We’re like, Oh, you need to do techno-economic analysis? We’re going to pair you with this organization here that can do it, and you don’t have to negotiate anything with them. We’re just going to send them the money, you’re given a voucher, and you just call them.
When I talk with venture capitalists, something that often comes up is the difficulty of getting startups through the so-called Valley of Death, the funding gap between a company’s initial rounds and its commercial scale-up. How do you think about the public sector’s role in helping companies through this stage?
First of all, this private sector-led, government-enabled idea around commercialization is really important. And the work we’ve done with Liftoff and how we’ve gotten money out the door has really worked, because for every dollar going out the door from DOE, we’ve seen $6 matching from the private sector. That in itself is showing that there’s a way for the public sector to nudge the private sector to act.
What I’ll tell you, though, is that I think there needs to be a wholesale reframe around how the private sector thinks about investments and the returns that they want on them. Right now, we are in the Squid Games, where everyone is first in line to be sixth or seventh, no one is first in line to be first, second, or third, because they know the person who is first, second, or third is going to lose money. So what we need to do is figure out, how do we have the ecosystem crowdsource the first 10 of a kind, so that we get to the tipping point where the unit economics are working? How do we get the private sector to promise to buy technologies when they’re not quite there? How do we in the public sector help on the back end?
What are other primary barriers to commercialization that you see?
Another big barrier is that the time clock for moving up the learning curve and moving down the cost curve is quite long in some of these hard-tech technologies. And so the challenge is, how do we convince CEOs to make investments in something which is not going to benefit them, but benefit a CEO two or three down the line? Humans just don’t work that way, right? They’re all about earnings per share and quarterly earning reports and so forth.
Now the challenge is, if we don’t do it, then countries like China are going to do it. This is what happened in solar: We invented the technology, but China was willing to take a loss in order to get up the learning curve and drive down the cost curve, and we need to figure out how to do the same.
Have you been in touch with anyone from the Trump administration? Do you know who your successor will be?
No idea. My team didn’t even know who I was until day one. But what I’ll tell you is that OTT has really strong bipartisan support because we’re commercializing technologies, which is creating jobs, and I think everyone understands the importance of this. Also for the [Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation] I was very deliberate with the other ex officio board members to make sure we had a bipartisan board. We have 13 board members that we appointed here at DOE, and I have representation from every single administration since George H.W. Bush, including two Trump appointees.
I really do hope that whoever sits in my seat will reach out, and I left a letter offering that, too. Hopefully they do give me a call because I really want to wish them every success in the work that they’re doing.
What’s it like to be back at the University of Pennsylvania, watching this new administration from a civilian perspective?
This was the best job ever, so I’m just sad in general to not be at the Department of Energy because I really enjoyed the work that we were doing there. A lot of the money from the BIL and IRA were used to catalyze many, many red states. I am hopeful that people in power recognize this and are going to do right by those counties. Because I think, in the end, what we’re trying to do is really help with American jobs and competitiveness.
Any thoughts on the executive order that’s frozen disbursement of funds from BIL and IRA?
I don’t know, because I always think it’s not right to be on the outside in, trying to figure out what different executive orders are trying to say or not say. We all have to wait to see how these get executed upon.
What do you think people should be keeping an eye on to gauge the impacts that these sweeping executive orders are having?
In my mind it’s really, is the private sector spooked? Are they going to continue to invest the money that’s needed for these manufacturing plants to continue and so forth? Because in the end, it’s the private sector that actually is driving American competitiveness — the federal government is a catalyst. And so I think what I’d be looking to is the private sector. Are they stopping the momentum that we helped to kickstart?
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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.