Tuesday, Summit County released an internal report on the errant evacuation order.
It details what went wrong when the alert meant for little more than 100 people in North Summit went out to thousands across Utah and Wyoming Aug. 9.
The Rocky Canyon Fire had started two days earlier near East Canyon State Park and spread toward Henefer.
The Summit County Sheriff’s Office, which houses the county’s emergency management department, was in charge of sending the notifications.
User error contributed to the Aug. 9 misfire, according to sheriff's spokesperson Skyler Talbot.
“However, it is worth mentioning that as we reviewed this, there were definitely parts of that platform and that user interface that were very counterintuitive, let's say, and did contribute to that user confusion,” he told KPCW.
The county says the emergency notification program, Everbridge, displayed parts of the evacuation message in a different order internally compared to what residents received on their cell phones.
The report authored by Summit County emergency personnel says that’s what led to push notifications saying “EVACUATE NOW” with little to no context.
Talbot said the employee who sent the notice also drew a circle on the map of where the notice would go.
The program said 107 Everbridge subscribers in the area would receive the evacuation order. But internally, without that number changing, the virtual boundary was somehow erased before the employee hit “send.”
Talbot said the sheriff’s office is improving its training to make sure the mistake doesn’t happen again.
“That’s something that we are going to work on through updated standard operating procedures,” he said. “But also, it’s our responsibility to ensure that the software we're using is the best out there. We don’t want to be caught in a situation where we’re using software that isn't meeting the needs of our community, and so that's something else that we're looking at as well.”
But those issues alone don’t explain why residents as far away as Wasatch County, Salt Lake County and Wyoming received the evacuation notice.
The final report says that appears to have been an issue with federally managed cellphone towers.
Cell towers are programmed with identifying codes to receive and transmit emergency alerts correctly. But the report states some cell towers were programmed with the codes associated with Summit County even though they were far away.
That’s why county officials think those towers unexpectedly relayed the evacuation order outside the actual evacuation area. They’re investigating that possibility further.
“It happened — we wish it didn't — but it has,” Talbot said. “Now the main focus is making sure that here locally, it's not happening again. But if we can, we’re going to fix potentially an issue that’s even bigger than Summit County.”
The Rocky Canyon Fire ultimately grew to more than 16,000 acres in size, but it didn’t cause any injuries or damage to homes.
