Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin seeks fire aid from federal officials

Press Democrat, The (Santa Rosa, CA)

March 21--Appearing before Congress Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin testified about the catastrophic losses suffered from the October fires and the county's need for improved emergency alert capabilities, better crisis preparation and evacuation planning, and money for a disaster-depleted county budget.

Gorin spoke at a hearing of a subcommittee for the Congressional Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure about the impacts of the state's 2017 fires. She highlighted both her personal loss -- her Oakmont home was one of almost 5,300 residences burned in Sonoma County -- and community losses of 24 dead and neighborhoods ravaged.

"You see in the debris, in the ashes, 45 years of life, of marriage, of family history, family photos, the ironing board sticking up in the ashes, and realizing you need to purchase every single item that you lost in the home," Gorin said. "It's overwhelming, both from a grief and a time perspective.

"Magnify my experience and my husband's experience times 5,000 or more and you get some scale of the needs of our community."

Gorin told of people fleeing their homes in terror the night of Oct. 8 and into the early hours of Oct. 9, some in their bare feet, awakened in the middle of night, their homes without power and a number of seniors unable to get their cars out of garages. With cell towers burning and a warning system that couldn't reach everyone, many evacuation notices came from first responders and neighbors who knocked on doors or phoned friends, she said.

"We absolutely need robust, effective and redundant alert systems that will not fail when the cell towers and the landlines come down," she said. "We need to prepare our community ... for the unfolding disasters in the future."

She told the representatives about the county's housing needs, already great before the fires and now exacerbated by the loss of thousands of homes. She spoke of the rebuilding needed and the thousands of additional construction workers required to do the work and who will need their own housing.

One option to help Sonoma County with future fires, she said, is already used in the Lake Tahoe region: cameras on tall poles. High-level cameras could have given officials early, crucial information to see the arcing wires and flames in Napa County before they swept into Sonoma County. The early notice might have allowed firefighting aircraft to hit the fires early, she said. Instead, with heavy cloud cover overnight and for the next few days, the air attack had a slow start.

The county also needs financial aid, Gorin told the representatives.

"We're grappling with a budget deficit in the tens of millions of dollars for the next couple of years" because of the fires' impacts, she said, and pleaded, "Anything you can do to help."

Mark Ghilarducci, California's director of the governor's Office of Emergency Services, also spoke Tuesday at the subcommittee hearing, reiterating comments he'd made earlier this year to state legislators, giving a statewide view of the devastation from several massive fires and their debilitating long-term economic impacts.

He acknowledged help from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, but also pointed out the latest federal budget proposal has FEMA grants being cut by 20 percent, from $350 million last year to $279 million at a time when a bigger investment is needed for more expected disasters across the country.