This post was updated Jan. 20 at 11:34 p.m.

Whether through emergency notifications or online maps, Angelenos stayed alert as fires began to spread across Los Angeles County. 

The first fire began in Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7 and has since burned over 23,000 acres, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, website. As of 10 p.m. Friday, no evacuation warnings or orders have been issued for UCLA, according to the Cal Fire website. 

[Related: LIVE: JANUARY 2025 FIRES]

People across LA County were sent false evacuation order notifications Jan. 9 and Jan. 10. The initial erroneous warning, sent out through phone notifications Jan. 9, was retracted several minutes later, but erroneous evacuation warnings continued sporadically throughout Friday. The alerts were caused by a technical glitch according to the New York Times. 

[Related: False evacuation warning sent out across Los Angeles County]

The false alerts caused some confusion for UCPD, said Acting UCLA Police Department Administrative Bureau Captain Jeff Chobanian. Coordination between different first responders is important for the different organizations to do their jobs, but, when the false alert went out, UCPD worried that they had missed an important communication, Chobanian said. 

The LA County Office of Emergency Management used a company called Genasys to send out the alerts during the fire, according to the L.A. Times. Following the faulty alerts, Genasys began investigating the issue, and the county switched to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services system to send out local alerts, according to the L.A. Times. 

Following the alert, UCPD received increased calls to its dispatch center and conducted additional patrols in order to minimize panic, Chobanian said. 

“Nothing really happened that prevented us from providing public safety services, so it really didn’t cause any issues for us,” Chobanian said. 

People can stay up to date on evacuation warnings and orders using the Cal Fire website, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and an app called Watch Duty. Watch Duty – run by a nonprofit – has grown in popularity since the beginning of the fires, and provides information about the fires. 

Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies, said some people are at a point of not knowing what media platforms to trust. He added that many systems thrive on both misinformation and disinformation. 

Spreading misinformation was an issue during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is still an issue during the LA County wildfires, Srinivasan said. He added that there need to be voices that are trustworthy and also unbiased. 

“I think that we need some ways to have more public consensus and awareness over what to trust and what not to trust, particularly in the context of situations like this,” Srinivasan said. “There has to be some understanding of what credibility is without seeing credibility as elitism or partisanship.”

Caitlin Brockenbrow, a first-year English student, said she received at least six alerts from the afternoon of Jan. 9 through the early morning of Jan. 10 while she was at home in Encino. After the first alert was sent, Brockenbrow, who lives near the areas that had been evacuated at the time, said she believed the alert was real and immediately began packing to evacuate. 

Brockenbrow said her first indication that the alert was false was that her area was not indicated as being in an evacuation warning zone on the Watch Duty app – an app that hit its record number of downloads during the wildfires. After she checked the app, she received the alert retracting the initial one, she said. 

Brockenbrow said she had to evacuate her home on Jan. 10, but she did not get an alert when the evacuation zone expanded to include her home. She only knew to evacuate because she was monitoring evacuation maps, such as the one on Watch Duty, and saw the evacuation zone had expanded to include her home, she said. 

“It (the false alert) definitely was quite stressful,” said Brockenbrow. “Then to not even get an accurate one when I actually did need to evacuate was certainly frustrating.”

Although UCPD attempted to reduce panic, Evan Garber, a first-year physics student, said the alert still caused fear. Garber, originally from New Jersey, said he was unsure if he should leave UCLA prior to the alert. The alert ultimately motivated him to leave campus to stay with family, Garber said. 

“I realized if we do have to leave, I’d rather leave now and not in the middle of the night,” Garber said.

[Related: Students host other Bruins in hometowns during Southern California fires]

Srinivasan also said  these alert systems should have a consensus-based response system –  where a community collectively agrees how to react to a situation – to have coherence, as emergencies are complex and dynamic. 

In terms of policy and technological improvements, there are many ways to make emergency systems better, Srinivasan said. For example, he said a California policy was passed that forces content generated by a generative AI system to be disclosed as such. 

“We have to keep trying these different policy proposals to try to help people because pretty much no one’s happy with the status quo when it comes to tech,” Srinivasan said. “Then the question is, what do you trust in times of crisis, right?”