a Better Bubble™
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This article is co-published with The Texas Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.
The devastating flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed dozens of people, inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and left the community desperate for a solution.
Since then, local flood experts have extensively studied the possibility of a multibillion-dollar tunnel system across Harris County, where Houston is located. Studies have focused on the construction of pipelines, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, that could ferry massive amounts of water out to the Gulf in the event of a storm.
Now, after years of research and discussion, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project.
An investigation by The Texas Newsroom and the Houston Chronicle has found that the billionaire, in partnership with Houston-area Rep. Wesley Hunt, has spent months aggressively pushing state and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. to build two narrower, 12-foot tunnels around one major watershed. That could be a potentially cheaper, but, at least one expert said, less effective solution to the region’s historic flooding woes.
Hunt’s team has said the Boring project would cost $760 million and involve the company getting 15% of the cost up front from state and local coffers.
Within two months of this push, the Harris County Commissioners Court unanimously voted to study a pilot program that included a look at smaller tunnels, with specifications similar to what Boring had pitched. The commissioners court, made up of five elected members including a county judge, oversees the county’s budget.
Both Musk and Hunt stand to benefit should Boring be selected to build any part of the project. Hunt is reportedly considering a challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary. And landing a job like this would also be a significant win for Boring, which has not completed a major public project in Texas and faces criticisms for its ventures elsewhere.
The discussions about the Boring pitch have happened mostly out of the public eye. Hunt mentioned the project in passing at a town hall in Houston in February. Since then, he has refused to answer the newsrooms’ questions about when Musk sold him on the idea and why he became its pitchman.
Efforts to reach Musk and representatives with Boring were unsuccessful.
Experts and some local officials question whether Musk and his company are the right pick for the job. The Boring Co. has focused on transportation tunnels, not flood mitigation.
“If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water,” said Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues. “So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars to do that? Well, maybe that’s not worth it.”
In response to the newsrooms’ questions, state and local officials said no public money has been allocated to Boring. County officials added that they have not chosen a tunnel contractor and any process to do so would follow normal procurement rules.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose staff met with Hunt’s team during the legislative session to discuss the proposal, remains open to the idea. As president of the Texas Senate with close ties to President Donald Trump, he is a powerful ally.
“If Elon Musk and the Boring Company, or any other company, can build two massive tunnels under the Houston bayous in a few years to save the city from flooding, I am always going to be interested to listen,” Patrick, a Republican, told the newsrooms. “The truth is, Elon Musk is one of the only people in the world who could accomplish this.”
Then-candidate Wesley Hunt, now a Republican representative, speaks with volunteers before they campaign on his behalf in 2020. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle) The Pitch Process BeginsIn 2022, the Harris County Flood Control District released findings from its yearslong tunnel study, which has so far cost nearly $3 million in local and federal funds.
The idea was to build eight tunnels, totalling around 130 miles in length, according to the report. The tunnels would be huge, wide enough for a container ship, and buried 40 to 140 feet underground, depending on the location. Austin and San Antonio have similar systems, although on a smaller scale.
The Buffalo Bayou segment of the Houston project — which Boring has proposed to build — is a centerpiece of the design and would run through the city’s core and some of its most developed neighborhoods. The county estimated it would cost $4.6 billion.
The total cost for the system was projected to be $30 billion, funded by a potential mix of federal, state and local dollars, and the timeline was 10 to 15 years to complete construction.
Given the scope and complexity of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in discussions about the tunnels since the beginning. The corps also has jurisdiction over the two federal reservoirs in the area.
Eight years after Harvey, however, the tunnel project has not broken ground.
Hunt has accused the Army Corps of “dragging their feet a little bit” because its study of the tunnel system has been delayed. In December, Congress ordered the Corps to finish the analysis. Hunt hailed the decision, but to date the Army Corps has not completed the study.
Just two months later, however, his staffers and Musk’s team started shopping Boring’s proposal to politicians across the state.
Emails, text messages and policy memos the newsrooms obtained through public records requests show Hunt’s chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, repeatedly attempted to obtain public money on behalf of Boring. The documents, which have not been released previously to the public, also lay out how Hunt worked to secure Musk access to lawmakers and other officials ahead of the formal bidding process.
Kyrkanides declined to comment for this story.
In February, Boring pitched its proposal to elected officials in Harris County as an “innovative and cost-effective solution.”
“We are confident in our ability to execute this project successfully to bring peace of mind to residents of Harris County and the greater Houston area during future flood events,” Jim Fitzgerald, Boring’s global head of business development, wrote in a two-page memo about the proposal addressed to Kyrkanides and shared with local officials.
That same month, Hunt spoke at a town hall meeting about his involvement.
“I talked to him” — Musk — “about Hurricane Harvey and how we need tunnels,” Hunt said, according to Community Impact. “He told me, ‘I can do that at a fraction of the cost the Army Corps of Engineers would do it.’”
A few days later, the head of a local nonprofit wrote to a county commissioner saying she’d heard Hunt and Musk were shopping the proposal around and that the idea may have been discussed on board the president’s jet.
“I hear that Congressman Hunt talked to Elon Musk about his boring company while on a trip on Airforce 1,” Colleen Gilbert, executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition, emailed.
It’s unclear if Trump was on board or took part in the discussions. The president’s spokespeople didn’t answer questions about the apparent meeting.
In April, Kyrkanides made a detailed pitch in an email to Patrick’s staff. He passed along Boring’s proposal and suggested that $60 million be set aside in the state budget “that will be matched with another $60 million” from the Harris County Flood Control District as a “down payment for the $760 million project Elon pitched Wesley.”
“I believe the Lt. Gov. spoke with Elon and the Boring Company this week,” Kyrkanides emailed in May, a month before the regular legislative session wrapped up. “Wesley also spoke with Elon, and everything seems on track!”
Kyrkanides followed up once more mid-month: “Anything you need from us?”
Pushing for Smaller TunnelsAs they pushed the idea to state lawmakers, Hunt’s team repeatedly lobbied Harris County officials, reaching out to at least two commissioners, the county’s legislative liaison and flood control experts.
Early on, Houston officials had concerns about what Boring proposed.
The two-page letter from Boring said its tunnels would be “no shallower than 15 feet to 30 feet below ground surface,” while the county’s previous research proposed a much deeper range for the Buffalo Bayou segment.
An engineering expert in County Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s office warned that Boring’s shallower plan could interfere with bridge foundations, utility lines and existing easements.
“It discusses that the tunnel would be much shallower then anticipated,” Eric Heppen, Ramsey’s director of engineering, wrote in an email to other staffers in his office on Feb. 17. “I would quickly confirm if it can be deeper or if that becomes a load challenge for the system.”
Boring said in its pitch that the tunnel depth is “flexible,” but the company did not respond to the newsrooms’ question about whether it can build to the standards outlined in the county’s study.
Volume was another concern. A single 40-foot-wide tunnel can move about 12,000 cubic feet of water every second, county studies show. Two 12-foot-wide tunnels, laid side by side, as Boring proposed, might struggle to keep pace in a flood emergency, according to Dunbar, the veteran water resources engineer.
“One would need eleven 12-foot diameter tunnels to provide the same flow capacity as one 40-foot diameter tunnel,” he told the newsrooms. “Providing only two 12-foot diameter tunnels does not provide the flow capacity that Harris County or the Corps of Engineers are seeking.”
Boring Co.’s Proposed Tunnels Would be Narrower and Shallower Than County Plan Calls for (Sources: Harris County Flood Control District study; Boring Co. tunnel pitch. Graphic: Ken Ellis, Houston Chronicle.)The county continued to engage with the company despite these concerns.
In March, Scott Elmer, who’s overseen the tunnel study for the past few years at the county’s flood control district, reached out to Boring executives to set up a meeting. In the following weeks, he and other flood control officials met with Boring engineers at least twice to discuss the specifics of Boring’s capabilities.
During one of the meetings, flood control officials pressed Boring representatives on whether the company could build tunnels that are at least 20 feet wide, according to an agenda shared with attendees via email.
The company was reportedly studying how to make tunnels as wide as 21 feet several years ago. But it’s unclear if Boring ever developed that capability or what it told county officials about its potential to make bigger tunnels. On its website, Boring notes it “maintains the same tunnel design for all projects to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ for every tunnel.”
An April 10 commissioners court meeting in Houston was a turning point.
That appears to be the first time county officials brought up in public the fact that Hunt had been pitching them on a smaller-scale version of the flood plan they’d studied for years. They referred to this idea as a pilot program that would focus on just a few sections of a larger, countywide tunnel system.
Ramsey, the panel’s only Republican, specifically mentioned the pilot program tunnels could be narrower in diameter, as small as 12 feet, and shallower — specifications that would fit the kind of tunnel Boring has typically built.
Commissioner Lesley Briones, a Democrat, said a pilot project may help kick-start a huge, expensive project that the county has struggled to get off the ground.
No one mentioned Boring or Musk explicitly until Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, said he’d gotten wind that the tech billionaire might be involved.
“I’ve heard all of the stories about Elon Musk having a tunneling company,” Ellis said. “I’ve got pretty good ears. I’ve got good Republican friends, too, now.”
He questioned the pitch, saying he was worried it would take the county off track.
However, Ellis and all of the commissioners unanimously voted to produce a white paper studying the idea of a scaled-down pilot project. They also voted to ask the state for flood mitigation funds. The vote didn’t require the county to commit to a specific project.
Later that month, records show the county’s legislative liaison reached out to staff for state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Finance, to indicate the county’s support for a $60 million budget rider for “underground flood risk reduction systems in Harris County.”
A two-page memo explaining the pilot project included with the request did not mention Musk or Boring and still referenced the larger 30- to 40-foot tunnels.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, points to a Texas- and Tesla-themed belt buckle as he answers a question about operating his business in Texas. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle) What’s in It for Musk’s AlliesHunt has been a leading voice on the need for flood mitigation during his short time in Congress.
Last year, he partnered with Democratic U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher to order the Army Corps of Engineers to move forward with the underground tunnel study. The effort was applauded as a bipartisan victory.
But Fletcher, a Democrat, said she was not involved in Hunt’s work with Musk on the Boring proposal and has “not heard from anyone advocating for it.” She said she’s worked with Army Corps of Engineers and local communities “on a transparent, informed, community-driven effort to address water conveyance and flood control in our region.”
A West Point graduate and former Army captain, Hunt has shaped a political brand that appeals to both GOP insiders and MAGA-leaning voters. He was a regular at Trump campaign events in and outside Texas and secured a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. He is the only Black Republican in the Texas congressional delegation.
But if Hunt enters the U.S. Senate race against Cornyn, he will likely need a high-profile political win to stand out, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, as incumbent senators in Texas have won nearly every primary over the past few decades.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also challenging Cornyn in the primary.
Given the volatile dynamic between Trump and Musk, aligning with the latter carries political risk but also the potential for major reward, Rottinghaus said.
“Hunt certainly is well-known enough as a member in his district, but the problem is that when you’re in Congress running for a statewide office, your base support can sometimes be very provincial,” Rottinghaus said. “To partner with Musk would provide for a kind of national profile that Hunt would need to be successful.”
Musk has tapped local politicians when pursuing similar big projects elsewhere.
In Tennessee, Republican leaders recently announced that Boring would build a transit tunnel for cars from downtown Nashville to the nearby airport. The city’s mayor and other Democratic leaders have raised questions about a lack of transparency, competitive bidding and environmental planning. At a public meeting in early August, a Boring official said the company would seek public input for the project but did not answer reporters’ questions about why they had not yet done so, according to the Nashville Banner.
In Las Vegas, where Boring built a transit tunnel system, the company was able to avoid many of the lengthy governmental reviews typical of these kinds of projects because it is privately operated and receives no federal funding, ProPublica previously reported.
In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company had pitched eight projects to Texas officials. Two were water drainage projects in Austin and Houston. Neither appears to have been built.
If Boring secures part of the Houston job, it would appear to be the company’s first public flood control project. The company lists only transportation-related projects on its website.
Texas law requires county governments to open large public projects to competitive bidding and give all potential contractors an equal shot under the same conditions.
While the law does not explicitly bar local officials from discussing projects with individual companies ahead of time, that kind of early outreach — though common in some places — hasn’t been expressly authorized by state courts or the attorney general, according to legal guidance from the Texas Municipal League, which provides legal guidance to local government officials.
Emily Woodell, the spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency has not shared any sensitive information with Boring about the Houston project and only met with the company to understand its capabilities.
Ramsey, the county commissioner, told the newsrooms he believes there’s nothing wrong with officials entertaining private pitches before the formal bidding process begins.
“All companies that might have an interest in it, that might understand and offer us information, certainly we’d be open to listening,” Ramsey said.
What’s NextThe future of the project, and Musk’s involvement, are still up in the air.
The state never granted Boring the $60 million it wanted for the project. Huffman, the senator overseeing the finance committee, confirmed the rider was never placed in the state budget and told the newsrooms she had nothing to do with the proposal.
“The only involvement my office had with this proposal was when Rep. Hunt’s chief of staff reached out to my scheduler to arrange a meeting between Rep. Hunt and me, but it never took place,” she said in a statement.
County officials also told the newsrooms that they haven’t provided any public money to Musk.
However, in June, the Harris County Flood Control District produced the pilot project report that commissioners voted for in the spring, looking at a scaled-back version of the original tunnel design. This white paper proposed focusing on only a few segments of the countywide tunnel system and considered tunnels as small as 10 feet in diameter as a real option — well within Boring’s ability to construct.
The white paper also floated the idea of a public-private partnership allowing a private firm to design, build and even run the system afterward, just as Boring has done elsewhere.
It does not appear that this report has been released to the public. The flood control district provided it to the newsrooms upon request.
Carlos Gomez, acting public affairs chief for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Galveston District, told the newsrooms he had not heard about the pilot project potentially involving The Boring Co. and could not say if his agency would be interested.
After the newsrooms presented them with the findings of this investigation, Briones and Ramsey emphasized they are not committed to one particular company and that all solutions would be subject to due diligence. Ellis told the newsrooms that Musk should not be involved, calling him “someone who has shown blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections.”
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Adrian Garcia, both Democrats, declined to comment.
Woodell, with the flood control district, said there have been no further discussions with Boring in months. She said the county has looked at smaller tunnels before but acknowledged that engineering analyses found large-diameter tunnels would be the most effective option for a countywide system. Woodell added the county might still consider smaller tunnels in “specific locations.”
“There will never be a single solution to flooding in Harris County,” she said.
If Harris County moves forward with a smaller-scale project like the one Hunt wants, which doesn’t rely on federal funding, the process to design and build it could still take up to a decade.
Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center, said Musk’s slimmer tunnels might still prove useful. But he warned against handing a project of this magnitude to a private company without proper vetting.
“The scale of the problem we have really demands, I think, all of us to be open-minded about ideas,” Blackburn told the newsrooms. “Invite them in. Just don’t give them the contract tomorrow.”
Lauren McGaughy is an investigative reporter and editor with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Yilun Cheng is an investigative reporter with the Houston Chronicle. Reach her at yilun.cheng@houstonchronicle.com.
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In the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died.
A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas.
“There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded.
Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region.
Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died.
The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over.
The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it.
ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides.
Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance.
In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them.
Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.”
Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds.
“There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.”
Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster.
Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died.
Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning.
“As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.”
Failure to Initiate Terrie Burns stands in the middle of her destroyed home in Santa Rosa, California, during the Sonoma County wildfires in 2017. The state conducted an audit of the county’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died.
The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.”
California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country.
Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem.
Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken those critical lessons and made big changes. The county expanded its emergency management office from five to 20 full- and part-time employees, including one whose job is to focus on alerting the public. That isn’t possible in many lower-resourced communities. But by the end of 2020, Sonoma had so improved its approach to alerts that it was among the counties that sent the most — 59 of them — during that dangerous wildfire season. Its two major wildfires that year, while fast and destructive, weren’t as swift-moving through densely populated areas as the worst of 2017’s wildfires. With the new protocol and staff, nobody in Sonoma died in them either.
Firefighters keep a close watch on a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. Massive wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses in 2017. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)Jorge Rodriguez is the county’s current alert coordinator. He described the litany of training and exercises required of employees, including creating templates of emergency messages ahead of time. “We really prepare to push the button,” he said.
That’s not true in many places.
Art Botterell, who retired in 2018 from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services as senior emergency services coordinator, calls the nation’s alert system “a moth-eaten patchwork quilt.” Officials in different places can try to get emergency messages to the public through IPAWS, their local alert programs, social media, email, phone calls, press conferences, flyers, door knocking, sirens, bullhorns and so on. Or they can do none of those things.
But if officials tap too few of them, or wait too long as danger closes in, then the tools become useless.
“The most common mode of warning system failure,” Botterell said, “is failure to initiate warnings in the first place.”
Tragedy in Texas A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing of the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the July 4 floods that left more than 100 people dead. (Scott Stephen Ball for The Washington Post via Getty Images)Last month, along the hills of Kerr County in Central Texas, visitors settled into RVs, residents slumbered in homes and summer campers dreamed of fun in the cabins that lace the Guadalupe River. But at 1:14 a.m., a blaring alarm punctured that calm, for those who received it. A National Weather Service alert sounded over weather radios and mobile devices in the area that had service — not a guarantee in this rural stretch — with a flash flood warning.
The weather service can, and often does, send its most pressing messages over IPAWS. But those alerts can lack important information for high-risk locations, including evacuation orders. Local officials can use the system to blast alerts that go to more specific areas — a few streets, a neighborhood, a river — along with directions for what people in those places should do to protect themselves.
It was July 4. Kerr County’s top elected official was asleep at his lake house 100 miles away. The sheriff was at home dozing, too. The emergency manager was sick in bed. That’s what each later said at a Texas legislative hearing. The weather service forecasts they’d heard the day before hadn’t struck them as particularly worrisome.
Farther up the Guadalupe River, around the town of Hunt, rain was falling. It fell and fell, pummeling the area so ferociously that children at camps along the river woke in fear and teenage counselors tried to soothe them. But the rain still poured and the power failed and the river rose. By 3 a.m., the two 911 dispatchers toiling overnight were overwhelmed with the most horrifying of calls. A deputy heard children screaming in the river.
Deputies and volunteer firefighters rushed to pound on doors and rouse people as the river hauled entire homes away, occupants trapped inside. The weather service posted on X, “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.”
At 3:57 a.m., someone called 911 from Camp Mystic in Hunt, where hundreds of children were attending Christian summer camp in cabins along the waterways. They climbed through windows, fought floodwaters and cowered under darkness along hillsides. The flood swept many away. At least 27 campers and counselors would die.
At 4:03 a.m., the weather service intensified its messaging for south-central Kerr County to a rare flash flood emergency — its most dire flood alert — which again blasted out over IPAWS to any cellphone that could receive it: “This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!”
The county judge, who as the top elected official heads emergency management, still slept, as did the emergency management coordinator. The sheriff didn’t wake until 4:20 a.m. Forty minutes later, Kerr County sent out an emergency message — but not over IPAWS.
Instead, officials opted for CodeRed, their local alerting system. Using software by companies like Everbridge and Smart911, systems like these are not nearly as far reaching as IPAWS. Residents have to sign up in advance to receive the local alerts, and not many typically do. In comparison, IPAWS is designed to reach any cellphone within a selected geographic area unless a person has turned off its notifications, has the phone turned off or in airplane mode, or isn’t connected to a working cell site broadcasting the alert.
The emergency management coordinator later told Texas legislators that he had helped incorporate IPAWS into Kerr County’s emergency response plans in 2020 partly to help ensure that its large seasonal population receives alerts while in town. But when he was finally woken during the floods that morning, he didn’t use it. He said the weather service had issued more than a dozen alerts already, and he thought that was enough.
By then, more than four hours had passed since the weather service blasted out its first IPAWS alert that day, during which local officials could have started sending their own messages telling people whether to evacuate or otherwise move out of harm’s way. Almost a third of those who died were camping or staying at campgrounds, the Houston Chronicle found.
As Texas state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican, said at a legislative hearing last month: “We have to find a way to give the locals more tools and more confidence” to make critical calls about issuing alerts quickly. “It cannot be when you see the river cresting.”
Roberto Marquez, left, created and installed crosses in Guadalupe Park in Kerrville, Texas, to honor the victims of the devastating flash flood along the Guadalupe River. (Desiree Rios for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Lack of ConsistencyNo federal policy tells local officials how to send emergency alerts in disasters — or whether to send them at all. Nor are there requirements of what alerts should say or who should get them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, outlines best practices but deems alerting decisions “a matter of local emergency official communications plans, governance, policies and procedures,” a FEMA spokesperson said.
Nor do local authorities have to learn a lot about IPAWS alerts to become authorized to send them. They must complete an online FEMA training module that goes over the basics, then apply for public alerting permission and sign an agreement.
“You do have to demonstrate that you have the software to utilize IPAWS, but you don’t have to demonstrate that you’re good at it,” said Jeannette Sutton, a University at Albany professor and key researcher of public alert messaging. FEMA offers alert guidance and 24/7 technical help, but using them isn’t mandatory. Its IPAWS division also will review local plans for sending alerts and suggest improvements — but local officials must request this help.
The biggest hurdle to accessing IPAWS isn’t training or testing. It is money. Local governments must pay a third-party vendor for software that can interface with IPAWS — an expense of potentially tens of thousands of dollars that rural and lower-income counties struggle to afford.
A study released in July by a team at Argonne National Laboratory found that 82% of local emergency managers cited a lack of funding as their main barrier to adopting more technology. More than half cited a lack of expertise or training.
In late 2019, Congress required FEMA to create a training and recertification process that IPAWS users would have to complete each year, but that remains in the works. Although FEMA was pursuing a contract to create the program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, did not approve the funding for it, a FEMA spokesperson said.
Despite this, FEMA “continues to lean forward to launch” the program, the spokesperson said in an email.
Using IPAWS also can be daunting. Some of the software systems that local governments purchase to interface with it are confusing and require practice, Sutton said. With a disaster looming or upon them, officials face a blank white text box. They must write the alert, code it correctly and get whatever permissions their policies require.
In the back of an emergency manager’s mind is that nagging question: What if I send out this alert and the threat turns out to be a big dud? “Then they’re going to get a lot of people who are really mad,” Sutton said.
Sending alerts also doesn’t always go perfectly. In 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly sent an alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message said, before being corrected 38 minutes later. The employee who sent it was later fired, although his attorney argued he was made a scapegoat.
Other times, software and other technical problems play a role. In January, a wildfire evacuation order sent to cellphones over IPAWS was intended for a specific area in Los Angeles County but instead blasted to all of its 10 million residents. The error stemmed from location data failing to save properly in the IPAWS system, likely due to its software vendor’s technical glitch, according to a recent congressional report.
A few months earlier, in September, an emergency manager in North Carolina hesitated to send IPAWS alerts as Hurricane Helene closed in on his county because a past experience had left him reluctant to try again.
A water line stains the side of an antique store in Yancey County four months after Hurricane Helene hit the mountainous region of Western North Carolina in September. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)Jeff Howell was the emergency manager in Yancey County, a rural expanse of mountainous beauty that Helene would soon decimate. A few years earlier, when he’d sent an IPAWS alert, the message blasted to cellphones in a neighboring county and to Johnson City, Tennessee. He fielded an angry phone call from a counterpart displeased that residents in his county had received it.
Howell, who has since retired, said was told the area’s mountainous topography played a role in the message casting too far. He didn’t want that to happen with Helene approaching.
Although the weather service warned almost 24 hours before Helene’s devastating floodwaters hit that the storm would be among the region’s worst weather events “in the modern era,” Yancey County sent no IPAWS alerts giving warnings or directions to people living along its rivers and creeks, which ferry water down steep mountains. In the end, 11 people died there, more per capita than in any other county.
In hindsight, Howell said he wished he’d tried harder to send an IPAWS alert before the unprecedented flash flooding and deadly landslides tore down the mountains. But he’d often fielded complaints from residents who told him they turned off weather notifications because they got so many of them.
Few other county or city governments across the wide swath of Western North Carolina inundated by Helene’s rainfall issued any of their own alerts over IPAWS before the storm knocked out cell service and electricity. Most used only their local systems or social media accounts, although ProPublica found wide variations across the region. Some made more aggressive efforts to warn residents, including rounds of door knocking. One county distributed flyers; another issued a dire video warning. But most residents remained in their homes, largely unaware that catastrophic danger approached. The vast majority of deaths in North Carolina were flood-related.
IPAWS asked Sutton to assess the warning messages sent during Helene. She wasn’t impressed: “There was a total lack of consistency.”
Hurricane Helene destroyed areas of Swannanoa, North Carolina, first image, as well as Micaville, where a massive fuel tank remained on its side four months after the storm hit. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) “We Need to Bring Some Coherence”During his first weeks as a new congressman in 2023, Rep. Kevin Mullin’s district in Northern California faced flooding that left one person dead. A Democrat from the San Francisco area, he began doing research. He read about incidents in other areas where alerts were confusing, delayed or not sent, leading to terrible consequences.
“This is really at the core of what government needs to get right — protecting public health and safety, protecting lives,” Mullin said. “The emergency alert is quite literally the front line of public interface.”
He also was looking for potentially bipartisan issues to work on. He hopes he’s found one.
Mullin and his staff are crafting a bill that would authorize $30 million a year for a decade to help FEMA provide technical assistance to authorities who send alerts. The money would fund things like live testing, field training and community-based exercises that can identify weaknesses in disaster plans and alert systems. These can be tough for local governments with fewer resources to afford. FEMA also would develop metrics for assessing alerts’ effectiveness.
Mullin, who expects to introduce the bill in the coming days, also supports creating basic standard operating procedures for alerts and templates for messages. “We need to bring some coherence to the way this infrastructure is set up,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin of California and his staff are crafting a bill that would require FEMA to provide more technical and financial assistance to local authorities who send emergency alerts. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)The template piece is out there. In 2021, FEMA hired Sutton’s team at the University at Albany to create the Message Design Dashboard. The new online toolkit walks message writers through a series of prompts to more quickly create an alert that includes content that social scientists have found best reduces the time people delay before taking action.
“By giving that tool to emergency managers, it’s a game changer,” Sutton said. “They’re not staring at that blank box anymore.”
Before her team’s contract ended in May, they trained 500 emergency managers to use the software, which is now free and publicly available through FEMA. But thousands more still need to be trained. And nothing requires emergency managers to learn to use it. That is up to them, and they still ultimately must decide for themselves whether to push that button.
Mollie Simon contributed research.
Wipfli, a national accounting, tax and advisory services provider, will hold a webinar on Thursday, September 18, designed for mid-market leaders working through uncertainty and rapid change. For construction executives, the webinar would highlight how to move beyond pilot projects and apply AI at scale to improve project efficiency, workforce management, risk control, and long-term […]
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