Supes Hear Report On Preparedness, Response Two Years After Wildfires

USA – The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors Tuesday heard about a host of improvements made by the county in disaster preparedness and response since the 2017 wildfires that burned 5,300 homes and killed 24 people.

Sonoma County Department of Emergency Management director Christopher Godley’s presentation, “Two Years & Counting,” focused on alerts and warnings, community preparedness, emergency management, emergency operations centers, county business functions and instructive incidents that happened after the fires including PG&E’s power shutoff in September and the February 2019 Russian River flood.

The first year after the wildfires was focused on healing, and the second year was about changes that were made and should be made that Godley said would take years.

“There was a great deal of fear in the community and not just about wildfires, and the antidote to fear is preparedness,” Godley said.

Godley said subscribers to the SoCo Alert system more than doubled in the past 18 months.

“We can reach 30 percent of the county pretty effectively,” Godley said.

A frequent challenge to alerting senior residents is their unfamiliar knowledge of communications technology and its warning capability. Some mobile phone services, such as Cricket, do not have emergency warning capability, Godley said. He said service and social organizations for seniors, mobile home residents and the disabled could help increase subscriptions to SoCo Alert.

According to Godley, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and the city of Santa Rosa are turning to Hi-Lo sirens that emit a different sound than traditional public safety sirens and will only be used in an emergency to alert residents within specific areas to evacuate. Grants are pending to buy the sirens and expand fire watch cameras in the county, Godley said.

The county’s Department of Emergency Management is authorized to hire 12 full-time employees. There currently are six full-time staff members, four more will start work next week and two more in six weeks, Godley said. Three employees have left in the past six months, he said.

The county has 1,000 cots and supplies as well as mobile showers in storage at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa. “Our goal is 5,000 cots,” Godley said.

There have been dozens of community events that focus on disaster preparedness and response since the Sonoma Complex fires in 2017, Godley said.

Supervisor Susan Gorin, who lost her Sonoma Valley home in the fire, said, “We don’t want to lose the sense of emergency.”

Sonoma County has applied for a $31 million hazard mitigation grant. Nearly $8 million will go toward early detection and warning systems, $1.8 million for flood elevation work and $6.7 million for home hardening and creating defensible space.

The Board of Supervisors authorized $900,000 in April for an expanded fuels reduction and landscape resiliency campaign. Between $375,000 and $400,000 will go toward proactive vegetation management inspections in the spring and fall of 2020.

“There’s been an uptick in compliance with vegetation management. We’ve done the most inspections in Sonoma County history,” Sonoma County Fire Marshal James Williams said.

There were 551 applications this year by residents for vegetation chipping, Williams said.

“There was a large influx in May and June,” he said.

The application deadline is now closed, but there is six more weeks of chipping remaining, Williams said.

Property owners are ultimately responsible for creating a defensible space, and the county is offering the chipping service as a supplement, he said.

Godley said, “There has been significant progress since the fires, but we need to maintain out focus, develop these programs and survive other disasters.”