Sonoma County unveils new map of evacuation zones as preparations ramp up for fire season

Emergency officials hope Sonoma County residents can spare a tiny bit of memory for a very important fact.

They want all locals to learn the name of the evacuation zone where they live so they can act quickly if disaster hits. And while they’re at it, folks should learn the zone for their work places and their kids’ schools, too, officials said.

The county and its nine cities have collaborated on a newly minted map that divides each jurisdiction into formally defined, labeled tracts intended to expedite evacuation notices and public action in the event of wildfire, flood, earthquake or some other crisis. There’s a new online lookup tool, too, to use now, to learn in advance which zone is which, though Santa Rosa residents, whose evacuation map debuted last year, already may be acquainted with theirs.

“If there’s ever an emergency requiring an evacuation, knowing your zone ahead of time will help you gather up your household and your things and evacuate quickly,” said Adriane Mertens, city’s spokewoman. “You don’t have to mess around with figuring out your evacuation zone because you have it posted on your refrigerator or on your phone or in your memory.”

The mapping effort, led by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, has been in the works for well over a year, beginning after the Kincade fire of October 2019 and the historic displacement of some 190,000 people feared to be in harm’s way at the height of the 77,758-acre blaze. The unprecedented evacuation orders reached from Healdsburg and Windsor east of Highway 101 to the Sonoma Coast.

The mass evacuations began three days after the wildfire started near Geyserville and two years after the devastating 2017 North Bay firestorm took 24 lives and destroyed 5,300 homes in Sonoma County.

In the Kincade fire, increasingly dire forecasts called for extreme winds gusting up to 80 mph led fire experts to fear that flames would race westward from the Mayacamas Mountains across much of the county.

Sheriff Mark Essick imposed a succession of evacuation orders developed at the wildfire command post in consultation with Cal Fire and defined by roads and highways, often resulting in confusing directions and descriptions.

Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, whose west county district was jolted by the far-reaching orders, said curving roadways and cardinal directions make it particularly difficult to detail such things to the public — and especially in the midst of an emergency, both for locals and those visiting from out of the area.

“Also, the fact that we, in some cases, have roads with the same name but one’s a road, one’s a lane, one’s an avenue. That also can create confusion,” she said. “And to be perfectly honest, there are some people who don’t know whether they live inside or outside city limits. This happens all the time in western Santa Rosa and Sebastopol.”

Having a place to plug in a street number or just consult a map, makes it crystal clear for residents while also streamlining internal operations in the midst of disaster, she said.

Essick was a captain in 2017 when the Tubbs fire swept overnight from Calistoga through the Mayacamas and into Sonoma County, leveling neighborhoods in the Mark West and Larkfield communities, and destroying much of Fountaingrove and nearly all of Coffey Park. County managers began to think then about better ways to handle mass evacuations.

“Then, after the Kincade fire in 2019, it really cemented our desire, our notion, and our urgent need to have a standardized evacuation map for the whole county, so we started, even during the cleanup period of the Kincade,” he said.

The county’s cities were encouraged to do the same.

A draft map had been developed by the time the LNU Lightning Complex fire broke out last August, so the sheriff’s office went ahead and used the newly designated zones to evacuate residents in and around the path of the Walbridge fire west of Healdsburg and north of Guerneville, even though they had hoped to subject the mapping to community input first.

Mertens said Santa Rosa’s public safety, traffic engineering and GIS mapping staff started working on a more standardized approach to evacuations in the summer of 2019 and published its map last August, during the LNU Complex fire. It was used the Glass fire, which would run over the ridgeline into eastern Santa Rosa in late September.

That map remains unchanged, she said, while the county has since tweaked the map it used during last year’s fires, making small changes to more efficiently staff traffic control sites and patrol 210 evacuation zones and take into account things like where the Russian River and creeks rise during heavy rains, since fires aren’t the only reasons evacuations are needed.

They also take into account and mirror, to an extent, existing patrol beats, so that deputies enforcing evacuations are familiar with the areas, said Jeffrey DuVall, deputy director at Sonoma County Department of Emergency Management.

But the changes mean everyone should double-check the new, formal map to make sure know which zone is theirs. They also can use the online tool or call 211 to find out.

Residents of unincorporated Sonoma County and of Windsor and Sonoma, which contract with the sheriff’s office for policing services, also are encouraged to obtain a printed evacuation tag from the sheriff’s office to hang outside their home in the event of evacuation, saving a deputy from having to waste time checking to see if a house is empty.

“I’m just very excited that this project is here,” DuVall said. “It’s going to be a great tool for our community to reference and to use for their planning purposes, to plan their way out of their homes and out of their communities.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that evacuation tags are available only to residents of unincorporated Sonoma County, Sonoma and Windsor.