Minutes earlier, she’d stepped onto the porch of her farmhouse to smoke a cigarette when she heard a familiar, jolting sound. Every Wednesday at noon for as long as anyone in the town of Carnation could remember, a high-pitched siren had blared in the small city, followed by a weekly dose of reassurance over a loudspeaker: “This is a test of the Tolt Dam Warning System.”
Since the time they’re children, locals learn that an alarm on Wednesday at noon is nothing to worry about: It’s just routine testing—everything is fine. But if the siren sounds at any other time during the week, it’s reason to head for higher ground immediately.
This time, it was a Tuesday. A message over the alarm’s accompanying speaker confirmed everyone’s fears: “The Tolt Dam has failed. Evacuate the area immediately.”
Becker, who had recently retired from Amazon, and her husband, Michael, scrambled to grab food and water and leashes for their howling golden retrievers. Yet, by the time they corralled the animals into their Toyota 4Runner, the typically vacant road abutting their property was already bumper-to-bumper. Roaring fire trucks had alerted families to scoop up their kids. They had an hour, tops, to leave town or climb to a higher elevation.
With most of the traffic heading west, away from the reported deluge, Becker decided, somewhat counterintuitively, to drive east toward the dam. The couple had friends who lived in the thickly forested highlands nearby. They could hole up there, potentially. But she only made it a mile. A woman driving a horse trailer had jackknifed across the narrow country road and gotten stuck, blocking it for everyone, after a passerby said a bridge nearby had breached and she needed to turn around.
So Becker doubled back, illegally driving westbound in the empty eastbound lane, incredulous that people were still waiting for the traffic light in the other lane when they could potentially drown at any moment. When she reached home, she walked down her driveway, and, with traffic westbound out of town at a standstill, decided to await her fate. She imagined their farmhouse, one of the oldest structures in the area, getting swept away. She imagined worse. I’m going to die, she thought.
“That’s when a guy said, ‘Oh, it’s all false. Don’t worry about it,’” says Becker. As she stood immobilized in her driveway, he leaned from his car and told her he’d seen a Facebook post that suggested the siren was a false alarm. Becker wasn’t sure whether to trust him, but a sheriff soon came by and confirmed the rumor. A crew working on the warning system had accidentally set it off. Everyone could go home.
The siren, which blared for more than 40 minutes, was the first and most harrowing of eight false alarms that sounded over a four-year span in Carnation. These repeated false alarms left residents with lingering stress, anxiety, and jangled nerves.
In August 2023, after the sixth failure of the alarm, the city declared a state of emergency, imploring Seattle officials to fix the problem. “Seattle’s dam puts all of our lives and property at risk,” Jim Ribail, Carnation’s mayor, told Seattle City Council that September. But even as Seattle Public Utilities has worked to improve the faulty warning system with new technology and equipment, they can’t alleviate the psychological toll it has already taken. “There are many people that live here today that still suffer from the PTSD [of] this first event,” Ribail said during a community forum later that month.
In the aftermath, some locals have taken measures to protect their mental health. One resident on the autism spectrum sets a timer for two minutes before the test siren on Wednesdays to mitigate his agitation. Becker, meanwhile, leaves town entirely on Wednesdays—every Wednesday. Once a standard, if still jarring, interjection in the quiet rhythm of the town, the siren is now “a trigger,” she says—an anxiety-inducing reminder of that awful day.
Beyond the haunting psychological effects, however, a more insidious and potentially damaging response to the spate of false alarms has also set in across Carnation: There have been so many false alarms, Becker says, that she and others are experiencing “the ‘cry wolf’ thing.” She says, “If it had went off today, I would have probably had that rush of panic, but I would have waited to try to figure out whether it was real or not. Waiting is probably not the right decision, but I just don’t trust it anymore.”
She’s not the only one. Each time the alarm sounded in Carnation, Ribail hopped in his truck and drove up to a 20-acre evacuation site in the Tolt Highlands. Each time, the mayor has waited for his constituents to join him there, only to discover “nobody’s coming up,” he says. (...)
Natural disaster alerting systems are generally more accurate than they once were but remain fallible, so those designing new systems have to ask themselves: What are the consequences of too many alarms versus too few? How frequently and under what circumstances should an alarm go off? And how can we protect these systems from embarrassing hacks, such as the one that occurred in Texas in 2021, in which subscribers received three alerts that killer doll Chucky was on the loose?
In our era of climate change, “having warnings that actually make people evacuate becomes more and more important,” says Katharina Hembach-Stunden, a researcher who worked on a recent study of the cry wolf effect while at Osnabrück University in Germany. “If you have too many false alarms, there’s a lot of research that hints toward people becoming more reluctant to actually respond to it. So you’ve run this risk of them not evacuating and then having higher losses—deaths.” Changing behavior is difficult, she says. (...)
Surveys of more than 4,000 southeastern United States residents discovered that people are very bad at estimating how often an alarm is false and that, even in areas with high numbers of false alarms, residents still sought shelter at among the highest rates.
“There’s mixed findings in that research, which is what makes it so interesting,” says Sarah DeYoung, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who was not part of the NOAA study. “In some communities, it’s led to hyper vigilance. In some communities or instances in some studies, it’s led to reduced vigilance.” (...)
Since 2012, various U.S. government authorities have sent tens of thousands of text message-like Wireless Emergency Alerts to inform different areas of crises such as missing children and severe weather. But at 8:08 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2018, residents of Hawaii received one unlike any before or since: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
It would be another 38 minutes before the government sent another alert with the professional equivalent of “just kidding.” Like in Carnation, a local agency was responsible for accidentally activating a false alarm.
Before the follow-up message, confusion reigned on the state’s constellation of islands. Locals wondered whether they were about to endure another Pearl Harbor. Some assumed it had been sent in error. Others called loved ones, thinking they were about to die, and desperately sought more information. A few were more fatalistic, wandering to the beach to drink wine.
These responses, and the aftermath show the wide variety of ways humans may react to the same incident. In a follow-up study in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, for example, at least one survey respondent reported he could never trust the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency again, while others said they’d be more prepared to take precautions for the next missile alert. (...)
Sharing information with others nearby to better understand a threat and its potential implications—also known as “milling”—was a common reaction in Hawaii, too, the survey found. Neighbors there conferred in driveways and messaged online, suggesting that before people decide to react to an alarm, they may consult others in the community rather than just rely on independent judgment. “I’ve noticed, across all my research and in my personal life, people do that social milling thing, where they’re going to look to see what other people are doing,” says DeYoung, who was one of the authors of the Hawaii paper.
Those who went online usually found reassurance sooner. Some saw posts by Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard that dispelled the missile myth. But others bemoaned the lack of physical cues around them. “A lot of people talked about listening for or noticing a lack of air raid sirens,” says Jennifer Trivedi, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who conducted interviews on the ground after the false missile alert.
A similar complaint would resurface five years later, after the Maui wildfires. The island has 80 siren towers—when natural disaster is imminent, they’re designed to blast long tones to let the public know to seek more information on radio or television and to evacuate to higher ground, head inland, or if they are inside a concrete building, to climb to the fourth floor or higher. The sirens are tested routinely, each month. But during the blazes, officials decided not to activate them at all—in part, for fear that residents would head into the hills, putting them at greater risk. Instead, they sent out only phone notifications. But many people never received these digital alerts, inviting a different but nagging question: How can we manage—and measure the efficacy of—alarms in an era of increased natural disasters if some people never hear the cry?
The roots of that question date back to the 1960s. At the time, scholars David Green and John Swets had just formulated what is known as signal detection theory, which proposed a framework for how people respond to stimuli, or signals—such as disasters—in situations of uncertainty. If they perceive a signal—say, a flood—but don’t get an alarm, it’s a “miss.” If they get an alarm, but no flood occurs, it’s a false alarm. Neither is a desired outcome, but which is worse over the long run?
by Benjamin Cassidy, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Ian Dewar Photography/Shutterstock; markk[ed. I was there (during the incoming missle threat in Hawaii) and most people just seemed sort of nonplussed and confused. Like, how could this be true? And, if it was, what could anyone do? There were no emergency sirens. Later we heard stories about a few people crawling into culverts and such, but mostly everybody just kind of hung around outside - 'milling' as it were - talking to neighbors and just going..."did you get this weird notice thing too?"]
