At 11:22 a.m., on Sept. 8, Cal Fire’s Butte Unit posted a message on Twitter: “Currently in Southern Butte County and around the greater Oroville area there is a large influx of smoke and ash from the Bear Fire up in Plumas County near Bucks Lake. The current winds are pushing it down into these areas, there is no fire currently in Butte County.”
Despite the fire’s distance, how quickly fire can spread was close to the minds of many in the area still recovering from the 2018 Camp Fire – California’s most deadly and destructive blaze. The smoky skies residents saw were concerning so many people began calling the Sheriff’s Office, as well as the neighboring Cal Fire Tehama-Glenn Unit to try to get some information.
At 12:03 p.m., the Cal Fire Butte Unit addressed the calls in another social media post on its Facebook page, asking residents to dial a public information line instead of the Tehama-Glenn Unit who didn’t have “the most up-to-date information on fire conditions.” The post also reiterated there was “no current threat to Butte County from this fire.
Less than an hour later, at 12:52 p.m. the Butte County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation warning due to the fire.
The Bear Fire, later known as the North Complex, started three weeks before that warning was issued – on Aug. 18 – in the Plumas National Forest after a lightning storm sparked several small fires. Most were contained, but two of the largest ones weren’t. These fires burned for nearly a month with fire fighters working tirelessly to hold containment lines near Quincy and other small woodland communities.
On the morning of Sept. 8, strong winds caused the fires to explode in size and fire crews lost control of the southwest side. Moving rapidly, the fire tore through fuel-laden forest that hadn’t been burned in a decade, crossing into Butte County. In less than 24 hours, the fire killed 16 people, destroyed the town of Berry Creek and prompted evacuations across communities in the county’s eastern foothills, including parts of Oroville and Paradise.
Two years earlier, during the 2018 Camp Fire, the county’s emergency alert system failed with news outlets uncovering many communication issues, including emergency dispatchers unaware of the unfolding situation, miscommunication among agency members that led to delays getting alerts out to residents and issued alerts not getting through to residents. But rarely do news outlets consider themselves as part of the emergency communication system, even though agencies often point to news outlets as the places to go for breaking news and emergency information.
According to documents obtained by the Butte County Sheriff’s Office and data from FEMA’s national system for local emergency alerting called the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS), the Sheriff’s Office issued four evacuation warnings and four immediate evacuation orders in the first 24 hours of the North Complex Fire. The first was a warning issued at 12:52 p.m. for Feather Falls and Clipper Mills. It was followed by an immediate evacuation order at 3:15 p.m. for those communities, and additionally, Berry Creek, Brush Creek and Forbestown.
The next evacuation warning was more than five hours later, at 8:39 p.m. for the communities of Kelly Ridge, Copley Acres, Mount Idea and Bangor.
Source: BCSO public records, IPAWS, Twitter, Facebook
During the evacuations, the Cal Fire Butte Unit gave only two updates on the physical location of the fire on social media. The Butte County Sheriff’s Office gave none. According to a Twitter post by D. Wilson – a National Weather Service Skywarn Storm Spotter and person behind Butte Wx Spotter – at 9:47 p.m., fire fighters were reporting over the scanner that eight to nine people were trapped on Bean Creek Road in Berry Creek. At 10:22 p.m., there was scanner chatter that fire was heavily impacting the area. Days later, sixteen-year-old Josiah Williams who lived between Bean Creek Road and Brush Creek was found among the deceased.
The majority of immediate evacuations took place in the following two hours after fire had entered Berry Creek. The Butte County Sheriff’s Office issued immediate evacuation orders at 10:30 p.m., 11:14 p.m. and 12:28 p.m. for areas near Miner’s Ranch Road at Highway 162 south to Oro Bangor to the county line, Kelly Ridge and Copley acres and Cherokee Road east to Lake Oroville. Two more evacuation warnings would follow: one at 2:01 a.m. for Oroville, Bangor, Palermo and Honcut and another, at 7:27 a.m., for lower Concow, where residents experienced the 2018 Camp Fire.
To make emergency communication more difficult, during the entire evacuation, Berry Creek and many other surrounding areas had no electricity. According to a report filed with the California Public Utility Commission by PG&E, the utility had de-energized power to the area the night before as part of a Public Safety Power Shutoff due to critical fire weather conditions.
Without electricity, many residents likely didn’t have normal access to TV, radio or internet making cell phones and social media an even more crucial way to get out information. But it wasn’t widely used by news outlets during the first day of the fire.
Data compiled from Twitter and Facebook, show that in addition to emergency alerts issued through CodeRED, WEA and the Emergency Alert System, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office published 15 posts on Twitter about the fire and 14 on Facebook. The Cal Fire Butte Unit published 17 posts on Twitter and 8 on Facebook. Only one news outlet outposted the agencies, and only on Twitter. That was Action News Now, which published 19 posts on Twitter during the first 24 hours of the fire. Most news outlets fell far below that number, with one, the Chico-Enterprise Record not posting to Facebook during this time at all.
Butte Wx Spotter far outdid any agency or news outlet on Twitter, publishing a total of 100 posts – more than both agencies and all five analyzed news outlets combined.
Both Butte Wx Spotter and all five news outlets published more information over Twitter than Facebook, but ironically data compiled from both platforms show that Facebook posts were shared more often than those on Twitter.
This is an ongoing project originally created for the course “Data Visualizaton” during the Fall 2020 semester at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The link is for internal use only and should not be shared outside of the J-School.