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How 2023 marked a renewed push for public power.

Voters in Maine were confronted with an unusual decision when they went to the polls this November. Question three on the ballot asked Mainers if they wanted to eliminate the two private utilities that delivered electricity to 97% of the state. A new, nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power would take over the service, and it would be overseen by a publicly-elected board.
Though the proposal may sound radical, it’s not unheard of. Since the dawn of the electric grid, communities have periodically decided to municipalize their utilities. The city of Sacramento, California, took over PG&E’s local electric distribution franchise in 1946. Winter Park, Florida, took over electric service from a company called Progress Energy in 2005. But a takeover at the state level has only been attempted by Nebraska, where the entire state’s electric service went public in the 1940s and has remained that way ever since.
Unlike in Nebraska, the campaign in Maine failed. Seventy percent of voters said “no” to question three. But the ballot measure wasn’t a one-off. This year marked a renewed push for public power that’s growing around the country in light of the challenges of tackling climate change.
Investor-owned utilities have used their vast financial resources and political influence to delay and block the transition off of fossil fuels, in ways large and small, for decades. Activists, tired of trying to work within that system, are turning their attention to what they see as the more systemic root cause — the perverse incentives created by having utilities that need to turn a profit.
Americans often refer to their electricity or gas providers as “public utilities.” But only about 15% of the population is served by a government-owned, customer-owned, or member-owned electric utility. The other 85% are beholden to private companies that were granted monopolies to sell electricity decades ago.
What started as a smattering of independent campaigns to change that ratio started to coalesce into a nationally coordinated movement this year. A few weeks before the vote on the ballot measure, some 70 delegates from about 40 grassroots climate groups from around the country convened for a workshop at the Press Hotel in Portland, Maine. For three days, they exchanged notes and strategies for how to get public power on the agenda in their own cities and states, and reform public utilities in places that already had them. By the end, they had cemented a more energized, organized coalition.
The guiding theory behind the push for public power is that public utilities don’t need to generate returns for shareholders, theoretically enabling them to make investments guided by other priorities, like reducing emissions — and charge customers less in the process.
“We’ve seen time and time again that the market is not going to correct this,” Greg Woodring, a workshop participant from Ann Arbor, Michigan, told me. “Public power gives us the ability to choose where our energy is coming from, the ability to directly make that change without having to ask or plead or beg or incentivize a corporate entity that, at the end of the day, is only making a decision based on what’s going to make the most profit possible.”
But public power is divisive in the larger climate movement. While not necessarily ideologically opposed, critics are concerned about wasting time and money. Private utilities don’t go without a fight, and communities can get bogged down in legal battles for years. The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously tried to wrest control over its electric service from the utility Xcel for a decade, and gave up.
In Maine, the Conservation Law Foundation, a prominent environmental group, warned that the cost of a transition to public power was too uncertain, that it could mire the state in litigation, and that having a publicly-elected board could subject critical energy decisions to “partisan political maneuvering.” Instead, the group made a case for strengthening laws and regulations. However, it also conceded that if the utilities don’t meet metrics of affordability and sustainability they should face stiffer fines, or even lose their ability to operate in the state.
Defenders of investor-owned utilities argue that they have advantages over nonprofits when it comes to building the clean grid of the future. “The investor-owned business model enables companies to raise and deploy massive amounts of capital in an efficient and cost-effective manner, and their purchasing power helps to minimize costs to customers,” said Sarah Durdaller, a spokesperson for the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for private electric utilities. She told me that the organization’s members’ “commitment to delivering resilient clean energy to our customers has never been stronger, and our focus on affordability has never been more important.”
The Maine campaign was not the first time a shift to publicly-owned utilities has been pitched as a climate strategy. One of the main motivations for Boulder’s effort, which started in 2010, was Xcel’s unwillingness to help the city meet its climate goals. But the increased momentum behind public power in 2023 signaled a new direction for climate activism more broadly, which had seemed to stagnate after the rise and fall of the youth-led Sunrise Movement and the election of Joe Biden.
“This is a site where we can practice democracy,” Isaac Sevier, one of the workshop organizers, told me. “I think that’s something that energizes people, it gives them more hope, it gives them something to be a part of and fight for and struggle for in a time when so many people are turning away.”
The workshop in Maine was convened by a handful of national organizations, including the Climate and Community Project, a progressive think tank, Lead Locally, a group that works to elect progressive candidates, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission.
The DSA has been a major force behind the recent surge in interest in public power. At the start of this year, it kicked off a new campaign called “Building for Power” focused on trying to strengthen public institutions at the local level. In addition to public power, DSA is advocating for green public housing and transit, and improved public spaces.
“We want to rebuild, and in some cases, build anew, public sector capacity,” Matt Haugen, one of the organizers of the workshop, told me. “Through decades of neoliberalism, the public sector has been hollowed out in the U.S., and we’re seeing in all these areas that it’s clear the private sector just cannot meet these human needs.”
Many of the participants at the workshop were DSA members, but there were also local organizers affiliated with national environmental organizations, like 350 and the Sierra Club, and others from smaller, grassroots groups. There was a freshman in college, a seasoned activist in his 80s, and many ages represented in between. While almost everyone there was from a left-leaning city, they hailed from every corner of the country, including California, Montana, Michigan, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
Some, like Woodring of Ann Arbor, were from cities that were already in the early stages of considering a public power takeover. His group had convinced the city council to complete a feasibility study on municipalization. Others, like Marta Meengs, from Missoula, Montana, were trying to figure out how to win smaller battles, like the right to have community-owned solar farms. Others wanted to reform existing public power agencies, like Amy Kelly from Tennessee, where the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority runs the grid — but is investing heavily in natural gas, and offers few avenues for civic engagement.
One such group had already seen some success. The New York chapter of the DSA passed the Build Public Renewables Act earlier this year after four years of campaigning. The law directs the New York Power Authority, an existing state-owned power provider, to shut down all of its fossil fuel plants by the end of 2031, and expands its mandate to include building renewable energy projects. Most residential customers in New York are actually served by private utilities, but proponents saw the law as a way to get more clean energy built, faster, and with high labor and equity standards.
The Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law signed by President Biden last year, is one reason the tides turned for the New York campaign. It enabled government agencies and nonprofits to take advantage of tax credits for renewable energy projects for the first time, improving the economics of public power.
“It really opens up a huge amount of additional space for public power to be a part of the answer,” Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Project, told me.
Though few of the participants had ever met or even heard of each others’ campaigns, the stories that led them to advocate for public power shared a number of common themes: Worsening power outages due to extreme weather. Alarm over the insufficient pace of emission reductions. Outrageously high bills. But perhaps most of all, frustration with constantly coming up against utilities wielding money and influence to fight clean energy.
Woodring, of Ann Arbor, cited a 2022 analysis that found that more than 90% of sitting legislators in Michigan at the time took money from groups and individuals affiliated with DTE, the biggest utility in the state. The company was also tied to more than $200,000 in donations to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who’s responsible for appointing the state’s utility regulators. As a result, according to the workshop participants from Michigan, the company has been able to restrict the growth of residential solar, which would eat into its profits.
Mikal Goodman, a 23-year-old city councilmember from Pontiac, Michigan, told me his interest in public power stemmed from DTE’s high rates and failure to invest in modernizing its transmission system. Some of its poles and wires dated back to before World War II, he said. Last winter, storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of households in southeast Michigan, leaving some families in the dark for over a week. But the day after one especially bad storm in February that left 450,000 people without power, DTE’s CEO Gerardo Norcia bragged to Wall Street analysts about the company’s “strong financial results” due to budget cuts and delayed maintenance.
In Pontiac, Goodman said, outages are life-threatening. He described the city as a donut hole — a poor, majority minority community surrounded by much wealthier, whiter towns. Most Pontiac residents don’t have the resources to run backup generators, replace rotting food, or flee to hotels if they need to, like many of their well-off neighbors, he said.
The idea that energy is a human right, and should not be treated as a commodity, came up repeatedly at the workshop. Many of the participants were drawn to public power by the desire to see an energy transition that benefits everyone, not just those who can afford clean energy.
Sevier, who has done a lot of work related to decarbonizing buildings, was frustrated that other advocates in the field were ignoring the growing energy affordability crisis. One in six households are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, and gas and electric utilities are increasingly disconnecting customers that are in arrears. A January report from Bailout Watch, a nonprofit watchdog of fossil fuel companies, estimated that the 12 utilities that perpetrated the vast majority of shutoffs between 2020 and the fall of 2022 could have forgiven the debt with just 1% of their spending on shareholder dividends.
“If we require that everything in your life become electric, but at the same time, we don’t transform a system that guarantees that everyone actually can have electricity,” Sevier told me, “then I ask, who are we building this ‘electrify everything’ system for?”
Other advocates questioned a system where the public is often forced to pay for a company’s mistakes, but which the public has no say over. Travis Gibrael, an organizer with a group called Reclaim Our Power in northern California, which is working on a public takeover of PG&E, described the hypocrisy of the state’s relationship with the company. Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration helped the company emerge from bankruptcy after it was found responsible for wildfires that destroyed whole towns and killed more than 100 people. Now the company is raising rates by 13% to pay for wildfire prevention measures like burying power lines.
“They burn down the state, they kill a bunch of people. And yet all of those liabilities are just put on us, including the people who lost family members,” Gibrael told me. “It’s like, we’re already paying for the cost of the system and all the crises that are coming from it. So for us to just own it, because we’re already paying for it, makes sense.”
Reclaim Our Power has allies in the city government of San Francisco, which is in the early stages of trying to purchase the local electric grid from PG&E.
In some ways, Maine seemed to be an ideal testing ground for such sweeping reforms. Central Maine Power and Versant, the two private electric companies in Maine that would have been ousted, are consistently rated the worst for customer satisfaction in the Northeast. CMP has faced multiple investigations and fines over its billing system, customer service, and delays connecting new solar projects to the grid. Mainers additionally hate the company due to a controversial power line it is building to deliver hydropower from Canada into the U.S.
Advocates also appealed to nationalist views by highlighting the fact that both companies have “foreign owners,” and that they are funneling ratepayer dollars out of the country rather than back into Maine’s communities. (CMP is owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company. Versant is owned by Enmax, a Canadian company owned by the city of Calgary.)
Public power advocates attributed their loss largely to the nearly $40 million the incumbent utilities spent fighting the campaign. “They outspent us 37 to one,” Lucy Hochschartner, the deputy campaign manager for Pine Tree Power, told me. “We were persuading people one by one, as they were getting absolutely inundated by messaging on the television, in their mailbox, on the radio, over digital.”
But she also said the campaign was successful in that it got a lot more people talking about the issue — it made national headlines for weeks — which could make it easier for future campaigns.
Reflecting on the loss, John Qua, a campaign manager at Lead Locally, told me it showed that running a ballot initiative is probably one of the most difficult ways to win public power. Another path is to try and win an electoral majority to enact legislation. “While it takes longer, you can cement a stronger, usually progressive majority in support,” he said.
Workshop attendees were clear-eyed about the fact that public ownership would not, in itself, be a silver bullet. They were quick to acknowledge the shortcomings of many existing public institutions, and that a publicly-owned utility will only be as strong as public participation in elections and decision making — a tall order when so few people today even understand the basics about where their energy comes from. Grace Brown, a researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who studies public power movements, said it’s a much harder proposition in the U.S. than in Europe, where people are used to relying on the government for services, and socialism isn’t such a dirty word.
“That’s not just about winning votes, it’s about changing the mindset of this whole country,” she told me. “It’s trying to change these huge ideological ideas of how this country understands what the state should be and what the government should do.”
Public power isn’t the only idea out there for breaking the inertia and corporate capture of the energy system. This year, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed laws that will prevent utilities from charging ratepayers for their lobbying efforts. Several states are experimenting with new, performance-based regulations, whereby utilities’ compensation is tied to specific goals, including emission reductions.
There’s also evidence that the existing channels for democratic engagement with the energy system aren’t totally broken. California and Michigan both recently made big strides on the climate and equity issues that public power advocates care about. This summer, the Golden State passed a law requiring utilities to design progressive rates tied to customers’ incomes. Michigan passed a law requiring utilities to use 100% clean energy by 2040.
The revitalized push for public power is about more than clean energy. To proponents, it’s about shaping this new, green energy system in a way that benefits a wider public. Whether or not they see more victories, the questions they are raising about who decides when and how we transition to this hypothetical clean energy future are already infiltrating the wider climate discussion. And as past public power movements, like the one in Boulder, have shown, even when the campaigns fail, the threat they pose to utilities is usually enough to get the companies to change their approach.
If there’s one thing I took away from the workshop, it’s that the movement is just getting started. Expect to see more high-profile campaigns — perhaps in San Francisco or Ann Arbor — in the coming years.
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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.