Most places that you travel to, Sonoma County included, have something called a hazard mitigation plan. It’s required by federal law, and local governments won’t qualify federal and state funds if they don’t have a hazard mitigation plan.
The word mitigation is one that a lot of people in the preparedness world use. The unfortunate part is that people don’t understand it. It’s a government term. So it’s peculiar to have people in emergency services say, “The future needs to be about a movement around mitigation.”
Mitigation is really about causing less harm, or removing all of the negative consequences of an action. For emergency services, it’s really synonymous with preparedness. It’s fixing potential problems before they happen.
Sonoma County had a hazard mitigation plan prior to October 8, 2017, but we were really prepared for the disasters we had encountered in the past, which were all slow moving. When the river would flood we became more and more resilient, time and time again. After those floods, we built houses up higher. We required places that flood to build up to an additional 10 feet. We had incremental changes that amounted to significant improvement over time. If we were to analyze Sonoma County over the past four or five floods on the lower river, you would find drastic differences, tens of thousands of units of difference between a non-resilient community, which flooded all the time, and what is now a resilient community.
Sonoma County has a long history of fire, but not as much recently. We’d gotten just far enough away from the 30- and 40-year fire cycle, that we weren’t paying as much attention. In 1964, the Hanley and the Nunn’s fires were basically equivalent to the Tubbs and the Nunn’s fires of 2017. But the major difference was that the ferocity of this storm was so different, so people can say, “You should have known,” right? But you say, “Yeah, it took two to four days for the fire to burn in the past, and it took four hours for it to burn this time.”
Going forward, let’s start by looking to the past again and realize that a year after the Hanley and Nunn’s fires of ‘64, there were more fires that destroyed more acreage than those. More than 120,000 acres burned in 1965. This region still has far more areas ready to burn, slide, flood and shake.
A report called the Community Wildfire Protection Plan by a group called Fire Safe Sonoma shows that a full third of the county’s population of 500,000 lives in the wildland urban interface. It’s where everybody wants to live. Everybody wants beautiful trees and landscapes. They want to be embedded with nature, but with no risk.
We have a system to protect those 150,000 residents of Sonoma County in the wildland urban interface. That system isn’t simply local government, but also includes community organizations, churches, nonprofits and a close analysis of other communities; those who are the best of best at being able to organizationally manage preparedness, response, and recovery. There are lessons to be learned San Diego, Santa Barbara, Lake County, Napa, further afield in Oklahoma, the Florida Keys, New York and Harris County in Texas. Even though those places encountered different types of events, we need to look to see who has excelled at adapting to systematically improve our operations.
Dissemination of information is vital, as is the understanding that people get information from a wide variety of fragmented sources. The issue we face these days, is that if you send out an emergency alert, maybe some people have their cell phone on, maybe others don’t. We want to be issuing alerts and making sure people know what’s going on, but if you send out too much information and alert people too often, they become numb to it. For example, Santa Barbara sent a series of alerts, including Wireless Emergency Alerts, during the winter flooding in Montecito and only had 15 percent compliance with a mandatory evacuation notice. Preparedness has to be something that is embedded in the culture where you live.
Ten thousand of the 77,000 people who live on the Florida Keys decided not to evacuate during Hurricane Irma despite the mandatory evacuation notice. They opted to ride it out because they think, “I’m strong, I’ve been through this before.” This infuriates emergency managers because then they have far more people left in harm’s way.
But in the case of San Diego County, which saw four evacuation orders in one winter, there’s a saturation effect. Potential evacuees might say, “I’m going to wait and see what happens.” Then all of a sudden, they’re buried in mud.
Preparedness cannot live in a plan, or in an office. It has to be threaded throughout a community, and it’s on local leadership to fix the gaps in our system that did not work. The first of those was our alert system. The second was the lack of coordination between entities.
We also need to focus on something called VOAD, Volunteer Organizations Active in Disaster. That would be our churches and nonprofits all pulling together with a plan for when there is an earthquake in Sonoma County like we anticipate there being in the next 20 years.
In Oklahoma, there’s an Emergency Health Corps, comprising 2,000 people who can deploy at any time. These are all well-trained people with certification and are highly organized volunteers. Why? Because Oklahoma County has had 23 declared disasters in the last 10 years. The system of preparedness needs to be strong. It needs to be one that empowers communities to depend on themselves, because there’s a certain amount of people who would like to say, “I expect the most out of government, but I trust it the least.”
The reality is that the system of government is only going to go so far. True resilience has to start at the individual and community level, because people on the ground will know and see what the dangers are around them and they will demand more out of their government. It is a self-feeding, positive cycle. After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
James Gore is the Fourth District (north county) Supervisor and the 2018 chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.
