Lessons from the 2017 Northern California wildfires spur new approach to public warnings

May 26-- May 26--What does it take to warn people about an immediate threat to their lives and homes?

The answer is dramatically different today than it was in October 2017 when wildfires erupted across Northern California on a hot and dry Sunday night. Warning plans built on outmoded landline telephone calls and voluntary alert programs proved little help to most of the more than 100,000 people in the North Bay forced to flee for their lives.

Forty people died across the region in the firestorm, including 24 victims in Sonoma County, spurring a painful reckoning over the need to more effectively warn people about the potential and imminent danger of widespread natural disasters.

The same urgent message was underscored last year by the frightening toll in Butte County, where 85 people perished in the Camp fire.

Armed with about a half- dozen revamped and new technical tools, emergency and public safety officials now have a different philosophy for emergency notifications than they did before: warn early and often.

"Our experience was so sharp, so deeply felt not only within Sonoma County but across the country," said Christopher Godley, who was brought on last year to lead and revamp the county's emergency division. "People are now more willing to look into alerts and warnings as being a significant area of investment, not just, 'Let's buy software or put sirens on a pole.'?"

In an age when people depend on cellphones, the fires underscored the crucial role telecommunication companies play in emergency notices, said state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg. He described a gap that remains between what those companies know and what they share -- a hole he's trying to fill with legislation introduced earlier this month that would require companies to report outages impacting 911 services.

"We shouldn't have to legislate common sense," McGuire said.

The North Coast lawmaker said the threat to public safety posed by California's multi-year drought and worsening fire conditions was already abundantly clear in 2015 after the Valley fire forced thousands to flee in Lake County, killing four people. Then again in 2017, wildfires laid bare the crucial need for earlier and more effective warnings to alert people in harm's way. McGuire lamented change didn't come fast enough for the community in and around Paradise overtaken by the Camp fire.

"Shame on us if we're not turning these glaring weaknesses into lessons and making them strengths," McGuire said. "We need to learn from mistakes in the past to ensure they don't happen again because this new reality (of big wildfires) is not going away."

If a disaster struck today in Sonoma County, the toolbox for public warnings includes:

-Automated phone calls through SoCo Alert, the county's opt-in warning program

-Pushed notifications from local authorities onto cellphones through the federal Wireless Emergency Alert system

-Warnings broadcast on TV and radio stations

-Social media alerts, including through Nixle.com, a service used by local law enforcement

-Specialized "hi-lo" sirens on Sonoma County sheriff's patrol cars, used to signal people to be on alert and seek out additional information

-Neighbors warning neighbors

By late summer, emergency officials in Sonoma County will be able to send emergency messages through weather radios -- perhaps the most dependable way to alert the public in difficult circumstances when the power is likely to fail, according to Godley.

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