On the afternoon of Aug. 22 , just hours into the fire, Washoe County Emergency Management Administrator Kelly Echeverria started sending out public alerts. Updates went to social media, cell phones, and local radio and TV stations — or so she thought.
But KUNR found the broadcast alerts Echeverria meant to send never went out over the air. The breakdown illustrates how complicated the emergency alert system is, and how many pitfalls it includes.
“We thought we were in the clear, and that our messages were going out,” Echeverria said.
The county didn’t realize what happened until KUNR asked about it in early September, after a review of the station’s broadcast log failed to show any alerts for the Hawk Fire. Once Echeverria learned about the problem, she got in touch with Rave, the software suite her office uses to notify the public in an emergency.
“We've gotten some answers from Rave that we don't agree with,” she said.
The company, which is a Motorola subsidiary, didn’t respond to an interview request in time for this story. But Echeverria says the company told her that, according to their records, it appeared she and her colleague didn’t select the Emergency Alert System (EAS), to receive updates.
EAS is FEMA’s system for broadcasting alerts on the radio and TV during a disaster. The messages are hard to miss: Each begins with a series of harsh, discordant tones, then shares information in a computer-generated voice.
Echeverria disagrees with Rave’s report. She and her colleague definitely selected the option for EAS, she said, so they’re asking for more details about what might have gone wrong. The county is also asking FEMA if it has any record of the alerts on its end.
“Show us that this error is directly tied to the fact that we didn’t check this box,” she said. “Like, where in your reporting, on your back end of your system, does it say, this box was not checked?”
Whatever happened last month, Washoe County is better-equipped for emergency communications than many local governments. That’s because while FEMA makes the EAS system free to use, it doesn’t provide an interface, so emergency managers have to use private platforms like Rave to send alerts.
“Some places only have social media that they're putting alerts out in. They don't have an additional vendor that they pay to distribute alerts through other means,” said Carson MacPherson-Krutsky with the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Natural Hazard Center.
In 2024, MacPherson-Krutsky co-published a survey of Colorado counties and found some of them couldn’t afford a service like Rave.
The kind of failure that happened during the Hawk Fire doesn’t seem to be widespread. But MacPherson-Krutsky said it is common to see problems with mobile alerts.
“You could just register landlines automatically, but now that we have cell phones, people have to actually physically sign up for these alerts,” she said, and added that according to the Colorado study, less than 40 percent of residents had taken that step.
Theoretically, officials can send Wireless Emergency Alerts, which are also administered by FEMA, to any phone in a given area. But they don’t always work reliably.
According to former Nevada EAS Chair Adrienne Abbott, that’s because service providers have done a poor job of implementing the system.
“We, in the EAS community, provide training for agencies to be able to use the cell phone alerts,” she said. “The industry has given us very, very little to work with.”
Multiple sources told KUNR that towers can get overwhelmed during an emergency, or even prioritize sending messages to one network over another. As a result, some residents are never notified.
So Evecherria said it’s important for residents to sign up for alerts on the county’s website. That way, her office can be sure to include them in future alerts.
“We will continue to use Rave, but what will change is how we approach it,” she said.
Meanwhile, MacPherson-Krutsky said federal officials should invest more resources in fixing these issues, because the stakes are high.
“When we're relying on these systems to save people's lives, we need that technology to operate how intended,” she said.
