When (And Why) Warnings Get Ignored
From floodwaters to false alarms, the complex challenge of emergency notifications
Note: This article is part of the Good Government Files series on Crisis Communications, where we share real-world stories and lessons from communicators who’ve faced high-stakes situations. Today’s piece focuses on the complex challenge of emergency notifications: why people tune them out, what governments can do to improve them, and the role communicators play in bridging the gap between alert and action.
I spent two days in the Kerrville Emergency Operations Center, volunteering in the Joint Information Center, a week after the July 4 Hill Country floods. In the JIC, one issue dominated media briefings and press inquiries: Did local officials do all they could to warn people?
The deaths of several young girls from Camp Mystic made national headlines, and the blame game started early—fueled by reports that no CodeRED alert was sent before floodwaters roared through the area in the early morning hours of July 4. One story making the rounds involved a volunteer firefighter calling county dispatch to suggest sending a CodeRED. The dispatcher said she needed supervisor approval. Whether that approval ever came isn’t yet clear.
It’s easy to latch onto one moment like that, but the reality is more complicated. Sending an emergency alert in real time isn’t as simple as pushing a button—especially when the people you most need to reach may have already tuned out.
A familiar kind of warning
After my shift in the EOC, I called my friend Jack, whose family has owned property in Hunt on the Guadalupe River since the 1930s. He was there with his wife and two dogs over the Fourth of July weekend.
The night of July 3, he checked the weather: 35% chance of rain. They brought in the laundry hanging on a line outside, went to bed, and were awoken a couple of times by thunder. Nothing unusual for a summer night in the Hill Country.
The real warning came around 4 a.m., from his aunt in the house next door. She’d gotten a call from a friend upstream: the river was rising fast, and cars parked in front of the houses were starting to float.
Within minutes, the water was at his deck; ten minutes later, it was almost to the second story inside the house (see photo below). Jack helped his relatives in a nearby house with a one-year-old escape off their roof. As daylight broke, Hunt VFD crews were pulling people from trees. Jack joined in, helping rescue two women—one airlifted out with a broken rib, the other with a broken arm.
Jack told me he couldn’t be sure weather alerts came through on their cell phones. (Cell service in that area of the Hill Country is notoriously spotty.) But he did say, if he did, he probably just silenced them and tried to go back to sleep without actually reading them.
As for the criticism aimed at county officials, Jack said the comments he’d seen on news stories and social media were completely over the top: “There are no fingers to point. It was a freak of nature at 3 a.m.”
I tend to agree with that. Yes, it’s known as Flash Flood Alley, but no one was predicting rainfall of Biblical proportions.
Jack also said he and his wife felt like they’d “won the lottery” to just be alive. They had neighbors who weren’t so fortunate.
Our shared responsibility
Jack’s story is typical of what research shows is becoming more common in our notification-intensive times: warnings came, but they weren’t acted on. That’s not always a government failure. People have to make themselves alertable—by keeping Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) turned on, subscribing to local alert systems, and following trusted official sources.
WEAs are the short, high-priority messages sent by government agencies to cell phones during emergencies, such as severe weather, AMBER Alerts, evacuation orders, or other imminent threats. They’re delivered through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) and don’t require residents to sign up, but they do require the WEA setting on the phone is turned on.
A 2023 RAND study found that nationwide, about 17.5% of smartphone users had opted out of at least one type of WEA alert. That’s where government communicators can make a difference. Not just in sending alerts, but in building the kind of trust and clarity that make people pay attention when it matters.
Lessons from Harris County
Brian Murray, Deputy Emergency Management Coordinator/PIO for Harris County, Texas (the Houston metro area), understands the challenge better than most. Harris County receives more weather-related Presidential Disaster Declarations than any county in America.
“You have to be in a position to receive alerts in order to be alerted,” he told me. “It’s one thing to say, ‘No one told me.’ It’s another to ask, ‘Did I have my phone set up? Was my WEA turned on? Did I sign up for local alerts?’”
Murray has seen how people tune out when alerts feel irrelevant. Texas leads the nation in WEA opt-outs, and much of that, he says, comes down to the cry wolf problem.
He saw it himself in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the region with 40-50 inches of rain and historic flooding in 2017. When he was promoted to his current role a couple of years later, he realized they needed to back off on sending warnings any time heavy rains were forecast.
“It got to the point where every time there was a drop of rain on the ground, people were nervous that they were going to get flooded out of their house,” he said. “And we kind of fell into the trap of over alerting every time it rained. I became communications supervisor in 2019 and one of the first things I said is we’re done with that. We cannot continue to tell people that every time it rains they need to be concerned about water coming in their front door because not only is it not accurate, but it’s not helpful. We need to warn people about what could actually happen.”
Message design matters, too.
“Move the action item to the top,” Murray said. “Don’t start with a five-paragraph weather dissertation. Start with: ‘Be prepared to leave your house now.’”
In Harris County, they also use ALL CAPS, bold text, and other cues to communicate urgency: “DO THIS NOW in red means more than a paragraph of background,” he said.
Murray’s team pushes alerts through as many channels as possible—ReadyHarris texts and emails, ethnic-language radio stations, public TV, etc.—and, when necessary, boots on the ground.
“Not everyone can or will get the message electronically,” he said. “But if a police car pulls up and says, ‘It’s time to go,’ most people will.”
Brian recommends looking into research done by Dr. Jeannette Sutton, an expert in risk and alert messaging. She offers evidence-based recommendations for improving WEAs and recently developed a message design dashboard for FEMA to help emergency managers write effective, actionable messages.
The PIO’s role
I’ve shared my Kerrville EOC experience on a 3CMA podcast and webinar, and the response tells me this is a topic our profession needs to keep talking about. I’ll keep writing about it here on GGF, so please share your ideas and concerns in the comments.
For now, PIOs can help improve emergency notifications by:
Advocating for better training for the people sending them
Designing messages that are clear, urgent, and actionable
Building public trust before disaster strikes
This isn’t just about government doing more—it’s about residents doing their part, too. Murray talked about having an effective partnership with the public. That’s what he’s working to build. He also advocates planning for the worst-case scenarios.
Because the gap between “receiving” and “acting” on a warning is where lives are lost.
Continuing the conversation
I’ll be hosting a GGF Office Hours session at the end of the month to talk about my time in the Kerrville EOC with the two Texas PIOs who volunteered alongside me—Jarrod Wise from the City of Lakeway and Joe Calderon from the City of Pearland. We’ll share what we saw, what we learned, and how communicators can help close that gap between alert and action.
Coming Next in the Crisis Communications Series: In our next installment, we’ll share a story that’s as heartbreaking as it is instructive: what happened when the mayor of a Texas city took her own life—and that of her daughter. Sharon Logan, then PIO for the City of Coppell, Texas, walks us through the hours, days, and weeks that followed, and the communications decisions that shaped her city’s response to an unthinkable tragedy.
Onward and Upward.