CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — As high fire danger and strong winds are expected along the Front Range on Wednesday, a critical resource used to alert Douglas County residents to emergencies, such as fire evacuations, is in the midst of a transition.
Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said his office signed a new contract to provide emergency alerts through Rave Alert, an emergency alert system owned by Motorola. In November, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office (DCSO) terminated its contract with CodeRED, an emergency alert system, after the company experienced outages following a cyberattack.
Crisis24, the company that owns the CodeRED platform, confirmed that data, including names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords of users signed up for alerts, may have been leaked to hackers.
In November, Sheriff Weekly told Denver7 he was frustrated with the company's lack of transparency about the outage. He said his office was not contacted by Crisis24 until deputies tried to send out a CodeRED alert to residents about a prescribed burn south of Larkspur.
"It didn't work. Nobody told us that the system was down. And not only was it down for Douglas County, but it also was down for the state of Colorado, and it was down across the country," said Sheriff Weekly. "Had we had a major event, a criminal event, like an active shooter situation, a wildfire, whatever, we would not have had, and we still don't have the ability to reach out to our citizens to let them know what's going on."
This week, as high winds could increase fire risk, Sheriff Weekly said the Rave Alert system is not fully operational. He said it could take a few weeks before residents can receive emergency alerts. In the meantime, he said the sheriff's office will post emergency updates on its social media platforms, while deputies will go "old-school" and knock on doors during fire evacuations.
"We are ready for whatever comes our way to keep our residents safe, but they should know that we don't take any of this lightly, and we're ready, and we're prepared," said Sheriff Weekly.
He said his office can use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) in the event of major emergencies, but it's not as quick as local alert systems. That's because sending out an IPAWS alert requires approval by the state's Office of Emergency Management, according to the sheriff.
"There's just a level of bureaucracy in there that we're not comfortable with. We'll do it if we have to. But this could potentially take 15, 20, or 30 minutes to get an IPAWS activated. That may be 15, 20, 30 minutes that we can't afford to lose," said Sheriff Weekly.
After the CodeRED data breach, several other Colorado agencies said they were reevaluating their contract with the company. In a news release on Tuesday, Weld County said it will continue to use CodeRED alerts, but is continuing its discussions about potentially switching platforms. Thornton Police told Denver7 it will also use CodeRED alerts for now, but is still evaluating other options for emergency alerts.
Nate Treusch, Emergency Communications Manager with the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office, said the county switched from CodeRED alerts to Rave Alert earlier this year before the data breach.
"We switched from CodeRED because it wasn't as user-friendly. There were some lags in loading for us, so it took us a little bit longer to send out emergency notifications than it should have, in our opinion," said Treusch.
He said the Rave Alert system can also notify more people about emergencies, even if they don't opt in.
"They ingest some other information to automatically load some people into our system," he said. "It gave us a much broader range of people that we could alert right away, versus waiting for people to opt in and trying to do that outreach."
Denver7 reached out to Crisis24 for updates on the cyberattack that caused outages for the company. We are still waiting to hear back.
