A dangerous side of America's digital divide: Who receives emergency alerts
Martha Matlock was checking on a cake in her Keithville, La., home last Tuesday afternoon when the strong, loud whoosh of a storm reverberated across her roof, rattling her mobile home. She jerked up, terrified, and quickly thought about her tenants on the next street over - a mother and son. She sprinted to her landline to call them, knowing her cellphone would be useless - because it always is where she lives.
"I couldn't get her. It just kept ringing and ringing," Matlock said of her tenant, Yoshiko Smith, who was home with her 8-year-old. Matlock said she tried the sheriff's office, which hung up because her connection was so poor, Smith's husband on his cell and the sheriff's office again and again. "I couldn't get through because our home phone and cell service wouldn't go through."
The whoosh turned out to be a powerful tornado, one of many that ripped through the South last week, ravaging communities like rural, woodsy Keithville in Caddo Parish. Matlock, a retired 69-year-old, said she and her husband did not get any emergency alerts on their cellphones and "had absolutely no clue that it was coming."
Matlock's frantic attempts to reach her tenants and authorities during the violent storm and her lack of alerts underscore the dangers that people in neighborhoods with little to no cellphone service face as severe storms approach, especially in rural areas. The lack of connectivity has become particularly risky as climate change has made weather more volatile. The National Weather Service has already sent out 62 cellphone emergency alerts to Louisiana residents about tornadoes this year - the highest number in a decade, compared with 10 at this time last year.
While America's digital divide has been improving, large chunks of the country, especially rural and tribal lands, are still lagging behind in connection, according to research and experts, and that significantly hampers their access to vital, potentially lifesaving information. Without cell towers, urgent emergency alerts can't get to phones and it is more difficult for residents to warn one another of danger or contact authorities.
About 25 million homes and small businesses nationwide are unserved or underserved, according to CostQuest, a broadband consulting firm that is working with the government on a new access map. Other experts say that number is probably much higher since it's difficult to track exactly how many Americans have inadequate service. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated connectivity problems in more densely populated neighborhoods with lower incomes, with more demand for data greatly overloading already aged infrastructure and poor service. It also led to more people moving to and working from home in areas where carriers have not upgraded or invested in for a long time, experts said.
"This is a widespread issue across the U.S.," said Rob Dale, a public alert and warning expert and the deputy emergency manager for Ingham County, Mich. "These areas, where cellphone coverage isn't there or reliable, tend to be left out of our easiest, most reliable alert system. Emergency managers have no way of enhancing what is not there."
In an emergency, the access to and flow of information is paramount. Ample research has found that a "lack of available crisis information or poorly managed information flow" can lead to its own crisis. In 2017, when historic disasters bore down on the United States, the Wireless Infrastructure Association pointed out in a report that "the reality is that lack of robust infrastructure can lead to a significant disparity of available emergency services for rural residents."
Not receiving emergency alerts has been a problem in other past disasters. In August, some northern California residents said they never got a notice that they were in the direct path of a massive wildfire, despite having signed up for them. Some survivors of the historic 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., said they did not get alerts as the fire raced toward the town.
The federal government has been improving tools and expanding funds to try to get emergency messaging to more people. State, local, and tribal officials and authorities can use Wireless Emergency Alerts, known as WEAs, to buzz phones about dangerous weather, missing children and other potentially life-threatening situations. Officials can target a specific area and send a message to any mobile phone, if the carrier agrees to be part of the system, even if service is throttled. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and Federal Communications Commission made upgrades to the system in 2019, allowing messages to be longer and sent in Spanish, fall into more specific categories, be better geo-targeted and include links.
"WEA is the easiest, most reliable system we have," Dale said. "People don't have to sign up for it, you don't need an app. Even with issues, we can still get 90 percent of phones, and there's nothing else that gets that kind of reliability for us."
However, these warnings are essentially useless if the impacted area does not have the adequate cellphone tower infrastructure to disseminate them, like Keithville, Dale and other officials said. And since this system is voluntary, emergency managers don't have a lot of power when it comes to fixing cell-dead zones. When people do not receive alerts, Dale said he and others share that information with carriers and "hope they move with it."
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The tornado in Keithville obliterated Smith's trailer, killing her and her son, Nikolus Little. Her husband, Jamie Little, had to show officers where their mobile home once stood in the Pecan Farms neighborhood, Matlock said. The widespread damage was shocking, but Matlock and others said they were not surprised they did not receive alerts about the developing storm and could not get in touch with authorities and people when they absolutely needed to.
Cell service in the town about 20 minutes south of Shreveport is consistently shoddy, and Pecan Farms is notorious for being a dead zone, residents said. In 2017, one man started a GoFundMe to try to get expensive tornado sirens for Keithville, because of the "spotty cellular and data coverage," but he had no luck. A tornado damaged his home the next month.
To use her cellphone, Matlock says she has to walk out to a certain spot in the middle of her yard or down the street, or wait until she gets into town. Matlock said she has spent years begging national carriers to upgrade and bolster infrastructure. Since 2015, she says she has been fighting with AT&T - a battle that, she said, became more urgent last year when a neighbor was having a heart attack and the Matlocks couldn't get an emergency call through.
"Corporate said, 'No, it's too expensive,'" she said. "Now we have lost lives."
AT&T did not respond to questions about Matlock's complaints. The company said that since 2019, it has placed nearly 60 new small cells in Caddo Parish and a macro cell in Keithville. A spokesperson advised customers who are experiencing service interruptions to call the helpline.
The FCC said it was "looking into any potential issues with the tornado alerts recently sent to Caddo Parish." Verizon did not respond to questions sent by The Washington Post.
A spokesperson with Louisiana's Public Service Commission said it often gets complaints about poor service and "throughout most of the state there are dead spots because cellphone companies don't want to spend the capital since there aren't a lot of folks out there."
Robert Jump, the Caddo Parish director of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said in an interview that after surveying the tornado devastation, he had to drive about 20 minutes before he could get anyone on the phone.
Like all emergency managers, Jump says his office uses several layers and methods to warn people about threats, including radios and door-knocking, which are key in rural areas. But not having the access to and reliability of cellphone infrastructure is "a challenge." And Matlock and other residents in Keithville said not only did no one knock on their door, they didn't know a tornado was coming toward them.
"Our connectivity needs to be updated," Jump said. "The notifications were there, but if you don't have cellphone coverage and you signed up for alerts, you would not have gotten them."
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) brought up the issue at a news conference last Thursday in New Iberia, where an EF2 tornado with up to 135 mph winds injured at least five people, overturned mobile homes and ripped the roof off a hospital. Residents in this community received multiple tornado warnings from the National Weather Service, the main agency responsible for sending out wireless emergency alerts, buzzing their cellphones and instructing them to take cover. But about 3 1/2 hours away, he said, parts of Caddo Parish did not.
"Unfortunately," Edwards said, "it was in a rural area where cellphone coverage is so poor that warning wasn't available for people yesterday. And it may or may not have made a difference. The point I'm trying to make is: Cellphones are not just a matter of convenience for communications, they're actually public safety instruments, as well."
The afternoon of the storm, Matlock said she couldn't reach Jamie Little by phone as he drove to work. Around 6 p.m., Little showed up on the back of a sheriff's four wheeler, asking if she'd seen his wife. It took authorities hours to comb through the downed trees and debris. They found Nikolus's body shortly before 11 p.m. and that of his mother a half-mile away at 3:30 a.m.
Yoshiko was the "love of his life," Little, who declined a request for an interview, wrote on a GoFundMe. His 8-year-old "was bright and charming."
"His death truly put a scar on my heart that won't be healed," the father wrote.
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It's a tough sell to get private companies to spend the time and money to build towers in rural areas, according to reports and experts. The federal government has launched several initiatives to help improve access to reliable service and spur investment. They include working with AT&T to create and expand the First Responder Network Authority, which recently added sites in West Virginia. In 2020, the FCC created the 5G Fund for Rural America, a $9 billion program aimed at bringing the broadband service to underserved areas. President Biden's recent Infrastructure Act is also helping bolster other connectivity programs for residents with lower incomes.
Because millions of households may have difficulty getting an emergency message, officials often rely on a patchwork of federal, public, private, and media systems and methods to disseminate information. But there is no perfect strategy, and there are often holes. In 2020, Caddo Parish switched to a new alerting platform called Everbridge, which enables officials to send messages to residents using landlines, cellphones, emails and other methods. The catch, though, is that people have to sign up for it. On average, Dale said, only about 30 percent of residents sign up for these types of services.
When asked whether she signed up for Everbridge, Matlock said she didn't know what it was, thinking it was a social network.
"I've never been on any kind of social media ever. No Facebook, nothing," she said.
That's where the national WEA system comes in: Emergency officials can get information to an at-risk area no matter what. But some communities are not aware they have access to it. Jump said he recently learned from a fellow emergency management peer that his department could use FEMA's online wireless alerting tool called the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System. IPAWS exists so that the president can alert the public about a critical national security threat, but federal, state, territorial, tribal and local authorities can also tap into this national wireless emergency alert system to send warnings to their specific jurisdictions.
"I thought it was just a federal tool, not for local entities," he said. "Then I learned that all I have to do is submit an application and go through training and they will let me be certified."
When the cold front that spawned the tornadoes approached Louisiana, Jump said he was in the middle of the IPAWS certification process. Once he gets through that, he said, he and his team will be able to ping phones about dangerous events, like floods - if they have the service.
Living surrounded by tall trees right outside Keithville's city limits, Jess Adams has gotten used to her coverage having a mind of its own. If a storm's coming, the 24-year-old mother of three can count on her phone cutting out. Sometimes her WiFi works, "sometimes it doesn't," she shrugged. And the farther into her community you go, the worse it gets.
Like Matlock, who lives about eight miles away, Adams said she had no idea that the tornado was coming. She found out about the looming danger when her daughter's school called informing families that they were sending children home early because of it. Shocked, she looked up the impending storm on a radar app.
When her children got home, the family walked out on their front porch and saw a dark funnel twirling above the trees. In the whirl, they thought they spotted a cat but realized it "was actually the attic insulation and shingles from someone's house."
It was a terrifying and mesmerizing image, she said.
But she didn't even bother pulling out her phone. She knew she wouldn't have service.
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