Disaster Preparedness

During my early days in the Air Force one of my duties was Base Mobility Plans officer. It was a dull job that nobody would volunteer for. I got stuck with it because Colonel Taylor thought I was reasonably well organized, a delusion I didn't dare disabuse him of.

The job involved preparing, maintaining, updating, and practicing response checklists for a wide variety of incidents, accidents, crashes, disasters and other troublesome pranks visited upon us by the sky gods. Once a month, typically during weekends, the Base Safety Officer would pick one of the scenarios and we would go through these detailed checklists as if something had actually happened. I had the master checklists. Someone in each organization on base had their own sub-checklist. Everybody acted as if The Bad Event had actually happened. Phone calls were made, people were dispatched, everything was exercised according to the checklists and checked off when the practice response was complete. 

The Base Safety Officer (a persnickety Major who was a former pilot I had had run-ins with when he was an active pilot) oversaw it all and reviewed every detail. On Monday I would be called on the carpet to Colonel Taylor's office with the Base Safety Officer who would tell me about everything that he thought had gone wrong during the exercise. In each case, the checklist had to be updated and each failing corrected and redistributed to everyone involved in the response scenario, ready for the next drill for that particular scenario.

It's dull work; nobody wants to go through the hassle of responding to a fake disaster especially when everybody knows it’s fake. But the process is essential because without it, important, perhaps lethal details in the real thing could get overlooked.

I was reminded of this last week in the aftermath of Sheriff Allman's complaint about county workers not responding to requests that employees report for disaster duty during the big fires, and the response to the Sheriff from Human Resources Director Heidi Dunham.

To this day, Mendocino County has conducted no formal independent review of the initial response to the fall 2017 wildfires in Redwood Valley and Potter Valley. (Sonoma County has, and they have improved some of their response protocols.) One would have thought that the fire-response problems encountered in late July of this year would have been mostly resolved if someone had done a review of the 2017 fire response. We also do not know of any exercises or drills having been conducted to practice for the variety of disasters, emergencies and accidents that could occur — and they are long overdue.

That's not to say that a lot of people did reasonably well considering the lack of the kinds of planning, checklists, preparation, training, and exercises that we were required to do in the military.

Nobody is suggesting that every scenario be planned for in detail like we did in the Air Force, but one would think that at least the most predictable ones — fires, mass communications breakdowns, mass casualty incidents, etc. — would certainly be planning priorities.

We would agree that pointing the finger at the people who at first seemed unable to unwilling to respond to emergency call ins turned out to be somewhat misplaced. But someone should have told Ms. Dunham that the problems she described (phone id, weekends and evening calls, etc.) should've been encountered, identified and corrected long before the recent fires.

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At last Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, several Brooktrails residents told the Board that more needs to be done regarding disaster preparedness and warnings. Brooktrails resident Doreen Blumenfeld's remarks were typical:

“I live at the top of Ridge Road which is at the very top of Brooktrails and I look out on thousands of acres of fuel toward the coast. I am here to address the issue of an early warning system and also Nixle [the county’s expanded reverse 911 system]. As we all know there are so many residents on Sherwood Road that would be affected by fire. Whether the fire comes from Highway 20 or from Sherwood Ranch or the gate, whether it comes from Brooktrails or in town on Sherwood Road… We would have a huge problem in leaving the area in a safe way. Our Sheriff has indicated that there could be hundreds of fatalities in a situation where we had a hard time evacuating. I appreciate the sheriff’s recently use of Nixle. It is a device, a method of communication that both Lake and Sonoma County use as well as many other counties. However, I strongly request that the Office of Emergency Services be given sufficient funds to hire public information officers to fully utilize the potential of Nixle. Otherwise it's like having a flashlight with no batteries when it's dark. Full use of Nixle would include reported and verified incidents from fire departments, public works and utilities. Only by having an early warning system can those of us with disabilities, special needs or those of us who live further out respond in an appropriate and orderly way. If Nixle reported all incidents under its three-tier system we could choose notices we want to subscribe to and act upon. This is currently done in Lake and Sonoma counties. I spoke with people from a fire department in Lake County and the chief of police in Lakeport. They use a public information officer to put information out. They support the policy that more information gives us more choice. It allows us to be responsible for ourselves and our neighbors. Facebook pages are not enough. Reverse 911 is not enough. We need an early warning system so we can choose to leave. On Monday there was an incident on the Willits grade with a fatality there. That would be an excellent example of using Nixle to so that those of us who need to travel the grade would know about the problematic traffic tie up. I heard about the two fires on Highway 20 from neighbors who were using scanners an hour before anything came out on the official facebook pages. That's not acceptable for various reasons if there was a problem.”

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After the Brooktrails contingent finished, Sheriff Tom Allman told the Board:

"The Sheriff's office is certainly aware of the need to notify the public 12 months of the year, not just during fire season, but during flood season and we are in California so earthquake season 12 months a year. Nixle is great, we are very grateful to have Nixle. One of the things that Nixle has told us is that if you do a big push and get everybody on Nixle and you start notifying them even within the three tiers you see a statistical drastic reduction of people who have signed up for it because we are notifying once a day over something and they really don't care because they live on the south coast and they are not that concerned about what's happening in another part of the county, or vice versa. So we want this to happen. We will gladly start improving our Nixle alerts. But we know on the other hand we are going to see a reduction in sign-ups. We do have a contract employee who comes in or who we can contact on the phone immediately when there is an emergency and he puts it on facebook and Nixle and so forth. So we do not need a full-time public information officer. I would love for the board to say, here's an extra chunk of money to hire a full-time public information officer. It would ease a lot of the work we are doing. I love sirens. Sirens are very very important. We learned from last year's fire in Redwood Valley that sirens are a great way of notifying. But let me tell you that there are no siren manufacturers in America anymore. Sirens have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs. The best we can do is pick up some old sirens and refurbish them. If a fire department has a siren, let's talk about it. One of the reasons that sirens stopped being used is that people complained about being awakened or disturbed. So we want to make the noise, we want to let people know, notify people. Then we get to one of the real problems that we learned through the tsunami sirens that we installed on the coast. The tsunami sirens are activated through digital communications and when you have a fire and you lose cellphones and cellphone towers you lose the ability to activate them. So we need manual activation of sirens. Then what about the power? How is the power going to be given to the siren if the electricity has been cut off? So there's a whole bunch of concerns on this. It's not as easy as saying let's just put six sirens in Brooktrails. I have looked at the area of and I believe six sirens would be the right number. I would love for the Brooktrails Township Community Board to say let's talk about this, between the Sheriff and the citizens. Let's come up with a program where maybe the fire chief or his designee could activate them. Let's go through this. This is on the front edge of everybody's mind. I was in Utah yesterday with the Lake County Sheriff. At the funeral for the battalion chief who died. We certainly understand the devastation of not just the communities but the human tolls that fires can do and we want to work on it 12 months of the year. If everybody would follow the Pine Mountain Fire Safe Council our county would be in better fire safe awareness right now. They have taken this to a new level of organization throughout the state. I appreciate what they are doing. I would welcome an agenda item specifically on emergency alerts because one of the things that we learned during this last Ranch and River fire was that we all have the wide area alerts that were given to us over cellphones. Whether you are signed up or not you got the wide area alert about the Ranch and River fires. With reverse 911, it's an opt-in, not an opt-out. So if people believe there is a conspiracy that the government is trying to track them they will not opt in. Those are some of the issues. The same goes with Nixle. But none of that is true. We don't do anything except to alert people. I would welcome an agenda item not just at this level but city councils and Brooktrails townships need to have this where you can't just say, Office of Emergency Services, what are you going to do for us? We will work with you and we will work to get funding if it's a mutual benefit. But if we don't have a buy-in at every other level when an emergency happens, everybody points to the county saying what are you going to do about this? And we have the 3490 square miles. That's a lot of area to cover. I would put some of the responsibility back on to the elected bodies throughout the county. We are in this together. It's not just one county organization. So to the citizens: thank you! We need to talk about this 12 months out of the year. I would welcome you to be here in January, I would welcome you being here in June when we talk about the budget. Because the budget is when we decide, the board decides where your dollars are going to be spent. We have to come up with a rational conclusion of keeping the public safe.”

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But the Sheriff didn’t say anything about disaster planning, preparation or practice. Fire season is not over. Has the County even fixed the phone-contact problem? Have they practiced the notification system for their own employees? Did it work? Was it practiced on the weekend or at night?

Maybe Official Mendo should worry less about who’s responding to what, and instead look a little harder in the mirror.