From fire to fault: Public reactions to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfire alerting as a model for aftershock earthquake early warning response

Allen L. Husker, Sandra Vaiciulyte, Jessie K. Saunders, & Lynn M. Hulse

Submitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14325, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

Timely and trusted warning systems are critical for protecting people from hazards during fast-moving events. Understanding how people perceive and respond to early warning alerts is therefore of urgent importance. In the USA, systems like the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) and ShakeAlert are designed to reach populations in such events. However, opportunities to study the effectiveness of alerting remain limited.

The January 2025 Los Angeles (LA) wildfires offer one such opportunity. Of the seven separate fires that initiated over four days, the largest – Palisades and Eaton – caused most evacuations and homes burned. The threat quickly died down as the fires were contained, although it was almost a month before the fires were fully contained. Throughout Day 1, warning and evacuation alerts were rapidly issued to cell phones using WEA to evacuate people at the edge of the Palisades and Eaton fire regions as the fires grew. The sequence of many initial alerts and a threat that falls off over time is similar to the alerting behavior that is expected during an aftershock sequence. WEA also issues alerts from ShakeAlert, the west coast USA earthquake early warning (EEW) alerting system. There are limited ways to test user responses to the system before an actual aftershock sequence occurs. User responses during the LA wildfires opens a unique opportunity to study how WEA worked in a crisis. One unexpected behavior was that individual WEA substations cached alerts during power outages so, when they came back online, alerts were issued long after they were supposed to be. Most concerning was an alert meant only for a small area that was mistakenly issued to all of LA county, which had 9 million+ residents.

We used a questionnaire to research people’s responses to the cell phone alerts. Findings indicate that trust in WEA was higher for more alerts received. The alert unintentionally sent to all of LA county had little effect on trust in WEA. People were most unhappy with WEA if they did not receive an alert, or received a late alert, but had to evacuate. Highest trust was given to the WatchDuty App, which included an updating map with fire information. We will present these findings along with others on people’s emotional state, decision-making, and action taken during the fires.

Key Words
Wildfire alerting as analog to aftershock sequence

Citation
Husker, A. L., Vaiciulyte, S., Saunders, J. K., & Hulse, L. M. (2025, 09). From fire to fault: Public reactions to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfire alerting as a model for aftershock earthquake early warning response. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Seismology