Sonoma County employees lacked training to handle response in October wildfires, new review finds

Sonoma County government employees were undertrained and overwhelmed during the October wildfires, and they clashed with elected leaders who wanted to play a more active role in emergency management, according to a long-awaited internal review of the county’s response to the disaster.

County staff involved in emergency coordination had spotty training records, the blunt self-assessment found, and public officials were not prepared to handle an event as severe and prolonged as the fires that besieged the region eight months ago, burning entire neighborhoods to the ground.

Workers inside the county’s civilian emergency command hub also were frustrated with what they saw as unreasonable expectations from members of the Board of Supervisors. Those leaders, in turn, felt shut out of the early response efforts, complicating their efforts to effectively communicate with the public.

The county review, which will be presented Monday to the Board of Supervisors, recommends the county strengthen its training requirements, clarify the roles of staff members and elected officials during disasters, hire more emergency management employees and create a new alert program to notify the public in cases of disaster.

The internal analysis, divided into three reports, is the most comprehensive and introspective analysis to date of Sonoma County’s fire response. It marks a turning point for the Board of Supervisors as it prepares to act on the findings with policy changes, spending decisions and a likely reorganization of its emergency management division, which was responsible for the county’s controversial decision not to send Amber Alert-style mass cellphone warnings about the developing firestorm.

“We were prepared for the disasters of the past. We were not ready for the new normal and for events of this magnitude,” said Supervisor James Gore, the board chairman. “I have to look at not just my constituents, but my family and myself in the mirror and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to be confident in light of the new normal.”

Much of the assessment echoes findings from the state Office of Emergency Services, which previously identified flaws in the way the county alerted the public to the fast-moving wildfires. It did not focus on the Sheriff’s Office, which had a large role in the disaster response, but on civilian divisions within county government.

Part of the internal review focused on the county’s emergency operations center, a facility at the county administrative campus in north Santa Rosa from which staff members directed the government’s response to the fires. The emergency center ran around the clock for 41 days, with some shifts at the peak of the fires staffed by 200 workers.

But that nerve center wasn’t up to the logistical challenges presented by October’s disaster, including half-dozen major fires and an equal number of smaller blazes burning across a wide swath of Sonoma County and three surrounding counties, according to the review. The operations center review drew on about 120 interviews or surveys with staff members and some external stakeholders involved in the emergency response.

Plans for the operations center had drawn from the government’s experience in comparatively modest emergencies such as flooding along the lower Russian River, so the severity and prolonged nature of the October wildfires far outpaced what the county was prepared to handle, the review found.

“This effectively made trained staff a minority,” the report stated.

The county had a training program in place to prepare staff members for assigned roles during local disasters, including at the emergency center. But the program wasn’t mandatory and “participation is uneven,” the report said.

Training had been completed by “very few” county staff members, the report said.

County Administrator Sheryl Bratton, who was in charge of the emergency operations center, now wants to require various levels of emergency training throughout the county government’s 4,000-member workforce.

“A very important shift that we need to make is making training mandatory - having a minimum number of hours per year, depending upon the position,” Bratton said. “And then also going beyond that and evaluating senior officials on how are they doing that as a component of their performance evaluation... so that, organizationally, we really focus and elevate the importance of it.”

Coordination with the county’s five elected supervisors was problematic, the report found.

Board members had “no established communication mechanism” to receive information from emergency center leadership or share information of their own, the report found. Supervisors also had unrealistic expectations early on about the kind of details staff members were able to provide, including the fires’ precise locations on the first day, the report stated. And staff members found themselves unable to keep the board informed quickly enough, given the center’s organizational structure.

“The first couple days of the event, we did not do a good job - I did not do a good job - of communicating with (supervisors) and making sure they were well aware of the situation,” Bratton said. “They were understandably frustrated.”

The report recommends the county develop written guidelines for how elected officials will be notified when disasters break out and the role they would play in the ongoing response.

Additionally, Bratton is recommending the Board of Supervisors spend about $1.2 million to strengthen staffing levels in the emergency management division, which is currently provided resources at “slightly below par” compared to other counties in the state, the review found. The money would fund five jobs, including two new positions related to a proposed community alert and warning program and greater responsibilities for the current emergency manager role, which would be reclassified as a director.

Gore said he supports funding additional resources for emergency preparedness, partly to ensure the staffers who do that work aren’t operating in a “bunker” and are engaging with the community more.

At a later date, the board may decide to shift the reporting structure of the emergency services division, which is currently housed within Bratton’s office, to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Staff members are still researching the issue, and they are expected to report back with a final recommendation in July.

At a minimum, the county may decide to move responsibility for its emergency alert and warning program to law enforcement, Bratton said.

Another part of the internal review focuses specifically on the issue of emergency alerts, coming in the wake of sustained criticism from residents who were distraught they never received any official warning about the fires. In Sonoma County, nearly 5,300 homes were destroyed and 24 people died in the disaster.

The review calls for the county to create a “first-class” countywide warning program that would incorporate “clear policy, innovative technology, real-time situational awareness and robust community engagement.”

The county has already reversed its previous stance on mass cellphone warnings, endorsing that tool for widespread alerts and expanding the pool of civilian employees and sworn officers who can send such notices. The Board of Supervisors has also discussed but not committed to other tools, including air raid-style sirens.

Some of the issues identified by the internal review relate to the county’s emergency operations building, which dates to 1974 when the county population was less than half its current size. The county may look to build an entirely new facility when it revamps the rest of the north Santa Rosa government campus - or moves elsewhere. Officials can make more immediate upgrades to the current center in the meantime, Bratton said.

You can reach Staff Writer J.D. Morris at 707-521-5337 or jd.morris@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @thejdmorris.