Sonoma County looks to expand use of weather radios for emergency alerts

Looking to boost their ability to notify residents when dangerous wildfires erupt, Santa Rosa and Sonoma County officials are developing a plan to roll out radios and other devices, such as bed shakers and strobe lights, to warn the public when danger is near.

It's the latest effort aimed at avoiding a replay of 2017, when the fast-moving Tubbs fire killed several people before they could escape their homes.

Two separate grants, one awarded to Santa Rosa in May and the other to Sonoma County in June, will contribute to putting as many as 10,400 weather radios in the homes of local residents before the year is over. The inexpensive weather radios are designed to work even when power outages and downed cellphone towers knock out other means of communication during an emergency, officials said.

The radios, more commonly used in the Midwest and the South to warn residents of severe weather such as tornadoes, can cost as little as $25 and are operated by National Weather Service offices across the country. They typically broadcast local and regional weather forecasts.

But they can also send an audible tone and relay short emergency alerts during disasters, even when they’re switched off. Some models come with built-in power backups that prove useful during power outages, which occurred last fall when the Kincade fire coincided with PG&E power shut-offs. And because they operate on a radio signal, cell service is not a prerequisite for receiving the notices.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, oversees the National Weather service and provides the radio transmissions as a public service.

“While the NOAA weather radio isn’t as fancy or complex as other alerts, it does provide us with a backup auxiliary where we can still communicate with people,” said Sam Wallis, Sonoma County’s alert and warning program manager. “But it’s actually a fairly uncommon thing in California. We don’t have a culture of using them.”

Santa Rosa officials hope to boost usage of the weather radios locally, an idea that sprouted after the catastrophic Tubbs fire exposed shortfalls is the county’s alert warning system, said Neil Bregman, an emergency preparedness manager with the Santa Rosa Fire Department.

A $318,000 federal hazard mitigation grant awarded to the city by the state’s Office of Emergency Services in late May paired with about $106,000 in local funds is expected to put roughly 7,500 to 10,000 weather radios in the hands of local residents by the end of the year, said Bregman, who is overseeing the project.

Sonoma County officials are planning to gift weather radios equipped with bed shakers and strobe light add-ons that can make the emergency warnings more noticeable for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, a community that is less likely to receive emergency alerts, Wallis said.

That project, which is expected to roll out in October and could aid 200 to 400 people with hearing impairments, will be paid for by a $33,000 hazard mitigation grant awarded to the county in June and $11,000 in county money, Wallis said.

Sonoma County also has been working with the Bay Area National Weather Service office on a new system that will automatically forward the county’s requests for nonweather emergency alerts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and then to the weather service, a change that is expected to pare down the number of steps needed to get such requests from counties to meteorologists, said Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the local weather office.

While National Weather Service offices have partnered with local governments to send emergency alerts via the NOAA weather radio system in the past, including in 2019 during the Kincade fire, that process included several steps in order to verify the information was coming from legitimate sources and not imitators, Garcia added.

It was not likely that many weather radios were being used in Sonoma County at the time, Wallis said.

The new system, the first of its kind in the country, will go through an inaugural trial run on Sept. 3, when Sonoma County conducts its annual emergency alerts test, Garcia added.

“Sonoma County is leaning way far forward on this and they’re pretty much going to set the stage for how we’re going to be able to communicate with our county partners in the Bay Area,” Garcia said. “If everything works right, Sam (Wallis) will not even have to call us.”

The weather radios are not a “silver bullet” for alerting, however, Garcia said. For one, emergency alerts sent out via the weather radios can’t be narrowed down to a particular geographic area within a county, though Garcia said he was working with Sonoma County officials to make that a reality by the start of next year’s fire season.

The National Weather Service’s audio emergency alerts also currently can only be made in English, though the agency was planning to add Spanish language libraries to their system, Garcia said.

Wallis also noted that there were communities along the Sonoma Coast that didn’t get strong radio coverage. Radio repeaters, which retransmit messages so they can travel a farther distance, could be one solution to that problem, he said.

Santa Rosa officials are expected to open public bidding on the weather radios this week, though the process of selecting a vendor, having the radios programmed to work in Sonoma County and shipping them to Santa Rosa likely will take until the end of the year to complete, Bregman said.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.