Natalie Chuck joined Denver7 Investigates in May 2024. Previously, she worked as a Multimedia Journalist in San Diego where she covered historic flooding, wrongful-death lawsuits, and cold cases.
ELBERT COUNTY, Colo. — As impacted Coloradans reflect on what happened during Sunday's tornado outbreak, many asked Denver7 Investigates why they did not receive alerts on their phones ahead of time.'Actually, we didn't get any out.
It wasn't even raining here,' said Juliet Madsen, the interim director of emergency management for Elbert County.Madsen confirmed the county did not send out any CodeRED or reverse 911 alerts to people in the Elkhorn Ranch neighborhood, which bore the brunt of Sunday's storm.'They didn't hear anything, they just saw it coming,' said Natalya Nazarov, whose husband and son were home as the tornado ripped through the community.Nacarov's husband confirmed with Denver7 Investigates that they never received any notifications.Another neighbor down the street told us his wife got an alert, but not until she was already on the phone with 911 after the tornado hit the area.Denver7's inbox was flooded on Sunday evening with community members asking questions, such as, 'Where were the sirens? Where were the warnings?'According to the county's website, 'Elbert County nor any of the county’s municipalities do not utilize sirens or audible alarms to notify the public of severe weather hazards.' As for why no other alerts were issued, Madsen said the county was 'not expecting a tornado.''We were expecting a little more rough and tumble weather up further north, northeast of the county, closer to Arapahoe and into Limon... but we weren't expecting it here,' Madsen said.As for the communities in Bennett that also experienced tornadoes over the weekend, 'A Code Red Alert was sent out to residents,' according to a post on X by the Arapahoe Sheriff's Office.Severe weather did not only hit Colorado. Devastating scenes continue coming out of other states, including Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Missouri.Concerns have been brewing nationwide when it comes to preparedness for severe weather after hundreds of employees with the National Weather Service were reportedly laid off as part of sweeping federal layoffs.'I think it's important to point out that, you know, the staffing is not the same across the entire country,' said Brian LaMarre, who recently retired from his career as a meteorologist-in-charge with the NWS in Tampa, Florida. 'There are some offices that are fully staffed, and there are some offices that are marginally staffed, and there's still some that are severely understaffed.'The local office in Colorado told us they were prepared for Sunday's storms.'We saw the event coming and we had enough people in here staffed up,' said Bernie Meier, a meteorologist in the Boulder office.Denver7 is committed to helping our Colorado neighbors on the long road to recovery. If you’d like to donate and help, click here to support the Denver7 Gives campaign. Your contributions are tax-deductible, and every dollar goes to the victims.LaMarre said the concern should come if severe weather hits severely understaffed NWS offices, but ensures the agency is working to mitigate issues.'The National Weather Service is actually grouping some offices together and what we call mutual aid, and so those mutual aid programs are really about having a few offices grouped together into one service unit,' said LaMarre. 'That will allow the extremely short-staffed office to focus on life-saving warnings, working with the managing emergency managers, and the other offices will take over kind of the day-to-day duties.'Denver7 asked Lamarre to explain how and why people occasionally receive alerts automatically on their smartphones, and other times do not.'The National Weather Service doesn't text people,' he said.Lamarre continued, explaining that the NWS alerts NOAA weather radios, which can then inherently provide alerts through phone providers directly to cell phones in impacted areas.'Some of the phones will have in their settings these emergency public alerts, and a lot of people, however, will turn them off... So, if they're woken up in the middle of the night, maybe it's a tornado warning, but the tornado warning wasn't specifically for their house, and maybe it was a mile away. They feel that they were woken up unnecessarily, and they're going to turn that alert off,' said Lamarre. 'I would definitely encourage everyone not to turn off those alerts because your phone is specially equipped that if you're within the broadcast area of a NOAA Weather Radio transmitter, if you're within that broadcast area of... where the National Weather Service draws the warnings, then you're going to get that alert on your phone.'Despite the lack of notifications from Elbert County on Sunday, everyone in Colorado is encouraged to sign up for local emergency notifications to better prepare for severe weather.
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