Skip to contentBy Mike Wood
Staff writer
Monday, July 15 (9:00 a.m.): A Contra Costa County civil grand jury report on the county’s Community Warning System (CWS) found risks of the system experiencing failure in a major emergency, most alarmingly because not enough people have signed up for the alerts.
Those risks, the grand jury found in its May 31 report, “may prevent the CWS from providing timely and accurate notices to all people in an area impacted by an emergency.”
The civil grand jury report is posted at https://tinyurl.com/28n22uxw on the Contra Costa County Superior Court website. Among its findings is that about 30% of county residents have created a CWS account and entered their contact data for the county’s warning alert for major disasters.
“Stunned and appalled” is how Fran Gibson, immediate past president of Rossmoor Emergency Preparedness Organization (EPO), described her reaction to the report. Gibson has worked in emergency preparedness for 25 years.
“In that time, I have never heard of an alert system in this bad of shape,” she said.
CWS is the only warning system in this county with access to the nation’s mass notification databases and tools, the report stated.
Within Rossmoor, Gibson estimates that only about 20 to 30% of residents are signed up for the CWS.
In an EPO newsletter, Gibson called the report “a failing grade” to the CWS. Gibson, who is on the Walnut Creek police chief’s Community Advisory Board, discussed the report at the board’s late June meeting with Chief Jamie Knox.
Going to automatic registration for all county residents and businesses topped the grand jury’s recommendations, which would mean switching to an “opt-out” basis, much like AMBER alerts regarding abducted or endangered children.
As noted in the report, the CWS is designed, maintained and operated by the Office of the Sheriff’s Emergency Services Division. There are three employees who plan, organize, maintain and operate the CWS, with one of those three who is designated as the lone on-call CWS duty officer, wherever they may be, who would be responsible for responding to requests to operate the warning system. There are an additional three to five Sheriff’s Office employees who can operate the CWS.
That raised concerns by the grand jury, which stated “the dependence on a single, on-call duty officer introduces a risk of delay in the CWS activation process.”
The grand jury cited a 2018 survey of Bay Area emergency warning programs that found Contra Costa to be the only county to rely exclusively on an on-call duty officer to operate its CWS.
The report recommends increasing training within the Sheriff’s Office to operate the CWS, and for extensive testing and studies of its effectiveness.
By law, the Sheriff’s Office is given 60 days and the County Board of Supervisors has 90 days to formally respond to the report.
“The county is still reviewing the grand jury report and does not comment until the Board of Supervisors has reviewed the document and adopted a formal response,” county spokesperson Kristi Jourdan wrote in a statement to the News.
The county’s civil grand jury is impaneled yearly “to investigate city and county governments, special districts and certain nonprofit corporations to ensure functions are performed in a lawful, economical and efficient manner,” as explained on the Contra Costa Superior Court website.
Regardless of Gibson’s reaction to the report, she still highly recommends that residents continue to utilize the CWS or that they sign up for it if they haven’t.
“There’s no reason to not sign up for it,” she said.
CWS is one of five alerts that EPO recommends for Rossmoor residents. The others are Rossmoor Nixle, WC Alert (Walnut Creek’s emergency alert system), the MyShake app for earthquake warning and FEMA’s weather app.
Sign-ups for CWS alerts can be made at https://cwsalerts.com/registration (online), 1-925-655-0111 (phone), cws-staff@so.cccounty.us (email) or by mailing 1850 Muir Road, Martinez, CA 94553. Residents can visit https://tinyurl.com/3kj35pff to sign up for Rossmoor Nixle and https://tinyurl.com/53bxt7fm to sign up for WC Alert. See the EPO website at www.rossmoorepo.org for more information.
The report cited warning system failures such as the 2018 Camp Fire that all but destroyed the town of Paradise and resulted in 85 deaths and the 2017 Wine Country fires, a series of 250 fires that impacted five counties, including Napa, and left 44 dead.
Since the inception of the CWS in this county, it has not been tested by an emergency that approaches that magnitude.
The CWS was utilized in May 2022 in Rossmoor to alert residents from Mutual 68 who voluntarily took part in a wildfire evacuation drill. One issue cited from that drill, which was deemed an overall success, was that some residents had the CWS alert call displayed as potential spam when receiving the call. Residents who use CWS were later urged to save that number as a contact on their smartphone to avoid confusion in a true emergency.