Sonoma County was unprepared for a megafire. Here is what changed to ensure that doesn’t happen again

“I didn’t want anyone to go through what we went through here. It was horrendous,” she said. “If my trauma and grief and agony can help prevent someone else’s, I was going to do whatever I could to help.”

In the early hours of the firestorm, emergency officials sent dozens of alerts through automated calls to landlines, texts and emails but reached a limited number of people. Many of those messages required residents to sign up ahead of time, and the fire knocked out power lines and communications towers.

A tool that could’ve pushed Amber Alert-style messages to all cellphones in the county, reaching both residents and visitors, simply wasn’t used.

Then-County Emergency Manager Christopher Helgren had chosen in 2016 not to use the federal Wireless Emergency Alerts system during local disasters, a decision later slammed by county supervisors and assailed by the state, which found the county’s emergency plans and systems “uncoordinated” and its understanding of alert technology outdated.

Gore, who as the Board of Supervisors chair in 2018 presided over many of those bruising public reckonings, acknowledged the county’s mistakes had put lives in peril.

“We should have woken up the world,” he told The Press Democrat’s Editorial Board in 2018.

Public outrage over the failures jolted residents and lawmakers into action, and the pressure spurred a new approach to emergency warnings.

Now the goal is to alert early and often, and have redundancies in place to ensure warnings reach as many people as possible.

“Twenty-four people lost their lives, and the best way to really honor that loss is to make sure it never happens again,” Sonoma County Emergency Management Director Christopher Godley said.

The county brought in Godley, an experienced emergency professional in the public and private sector, to replace Helgren who retired under a cloud of controversy in March 2018.

Godley helped reorganize emergency management, then housed under Fire and Emergency Services, into an independent department that he was later appointed to lead. The change has boosted communication with elected officials and other department heads, led to increased funding and a larger emergency team, Godley said.

That includes a $500,000 budget for alert and warning programs and dedicated staff who are trained on how to use the federal alert system, he said.

Leaders in Santa Rosa have acquired a federal license to use the alert system independently of the county, which allows the city to bypass red tape when issuing alerts and notify residents more quickly, said Neil Bregman, the city’s emergency preparedness manager.

“What we heard from 2017 was that you didn’t warn us, you didn’t tell us, you didn’t give us time, and that’s very impactful and meaningful and absolutely true and it will not happen again on my watch,” Bregman said. “Not only has our philosophy changed about using the system, but we have the ability to do it much more quickly and surgically than we did then.”

The two agencies can now pinpoint alerts to areas most affected and can send longer, more thorough messages.

In 2020, the system was activated 56 times, Godley said.

Enrollment in SoCo Alerts, the opt-in emergency notification system, has been boosted by using utility information to enroll water and electric customers, and emergency officials are turning to less traditional tools like weather radios to keep residents informed, too. The agencies have distributed 12,000 radios, commonly used in the Midwest to warn of tornadoes, along with shakers and strobe lights for people who are visually or hearing-impaired.

Jessica Tunis said now that the systems are in place, it falls on residents to do their part, signing up for alerts and setting up notifications on their phone. She expressed frustration with those who dismiss the alerts as an annoyance.

“I wish I could just shake them,” she said. “You don’t understand how desperately I wish my mother had gotten an alert like that and would’ve been startled awake.”

Improving evacuations

Authorities and residents also have collaborated to improve plans to get people out of harm’s way.

Godley said evacuations were rare before 2017 and plans were often drawn up as emergencies were unfolding. Police and fire personnel would be deployed to survey the scene and officials would map the evacuation areas, a time-intensive process that could confuse residents about whether they were inside the affected zone, he said.

The county and cities have since created designated evacuation zones to more efficiently evacuate neighborhoods. They have a menu of prewritten and recorded evacuation notices that can quickly be sent to residents in English and Spanish.

This has allowed public safety officials to get thousands of people quickly out of danger and lessened the flood of calls to 911, allowing first responders to attack fires more rapidly , officials said.

“Literally, now we press a button and it’s out to the world,” Bregman said.

Evacuation drills have since been staged in many of the region’s high fire-risk neighborhoods, giving residents a daytime dry run before a real disaster.

Police agencies across the county can also use hi-lo sirens to alert residents as part of a local pilot started in 2018. A 2020 bill introduced by state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, authorized law enforcement agencies across the state to use the technology, which has a different tone than emergency sirens.

In the event someone can’t evacuate, dispatchers, too, have a new script they rely on to help callers trapped by fires find a way out or a safe place to hunker down if their neighborhood is overrun by flames. The guidelines were developed Redcom, the county’s 911 fire and medical dispatch, in the aftermath of 2017 after dispatchers working that night were inundated by panicked calls without a playbook on how to help people get to safety.

Lawmakers target PG&E

Many of the changes have sought to address Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s role in sparking catastrophic Northern California wildfires.

PG&E electrical equipment started fires that burned nearly 1.5 million acres, destroyed nearly 24,000 structures and killed 113 people in the last 12 years, according to a federal judge’s estimate earlier this year, including the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.

Though Cal Fire investigators ultimately found the Tubbs Fire was caused by a failure in a private electrical system, at least 12 blazes that sparked Oct. 8 and 9 in the North Bay and across Northern California were tied to PG&E equipment.

The liabilities from the 2017 firestorm and the Camp Fire plunged the nation’s largest utility, which serves about 5.5 million customers from Eureka to Bakersfield, into bankruptcy.

The company has cleared vegetation around some power lines in areas most at risk to fire threat and installed weather stations and fire detection cameras throughout its network. The company has implemented technology that automatically shuts off power to lines when trees or branches hit them, a program it plans to expand.

But many of the changes have been slow to happen, with lawmakers pointing out that it has required judges’ orders and state mandates to force the utility into action.

Executives vowed in 2021 to spend at least $15 billion to bury 10,000 miles of power lines to mitigate the risk of equipment causing fires. But PG&E has fallen short on its annual goals, according to a consultant for the California Public Utilities Commission.

“I can’t tell you how angry I have been at America’s largest utility,” McGuire said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom this year signed into law a McGuire bill that mandates PG&E bury 10,000 miles of the most vulnerable lines within 10 years. An independent monitor will oversee the effort, and the utility must use federal dollars before asking ratepayers to fund the work.

McGuire said the utility has underfunded its wildfire prevention work for decades, failing to harden its grid and standing in the way of safety upgrades. “This state can no longer accept their lip service,” he said.

PG&E spokesperson Deanna Contreras said the company has been actively making its network safer, using new technologies and tools to prevent and respond to wildfires and updating the system to prevent wildfire safety outages and reduce the impact of public safety power shut-offs.

“PG&E’s most important responsibility is the safety of our customers and communities,” Contreras said.

Vulnerable communities left behind

The 2017 fires also exposed inequities in emergency response, highlighting a lack of resources for Spanish speakers and the difficulties older residents and people with mobility issues face in evacuations.

Alegría De La Cruz, then an attorney in the Sonoma County Counsel’s Office, found urgent messages weren’t being sent in Spanish as she assisted with operations in the early hours of Oct. 9.

“I grew up hearing Spanish around me, and if it’s not present it makes me feel like something is missing. That’s my lived experience,” she said.

De La Cruz and others jumped into action during the firestorms, getting emergency alerts and county communications translated into Spanish and partnering with community groups to gather a team of Spanish speakers who could help in the shelters and answer public information hotlines.

Today, providing information in multiple languages is part of the county’s regular process, not just an afterthought, and the county recently incorporated cultural competency measures into its emergency plan to ensure people with cultural, linguistic and physical differences are included in the planning and response process, an update now mandated by state law.

De La Cruz, who in 2020 was appointed to lead the county’s new Office of Equity, said the county must work to better connect with the immigrant and farmworker communities, particularly providing information in Indigenous languages. Ventura County, for example, hired employees who speak Mixteco, an Indigenous language common in Oaxaca, to aid farmworkers after the Thomas Fire. Sonoma County, meanwhile, relies on community groups for translations, she said.

Another vulnerable community includes older adults and those who are disabled. At least five people died in the fires because they were unable to get out of their garages when electric doors failed to open after the power failed or when they were unable to manually lift the heavy doors.

State law now requires new electric garage doors to be equipped with backup batteries, a bill introduced by Dodd, who, along with several of his neighbors, was unable to get out of the garage of his Napa home during the Atlas Fire.

The fires catapulted Santa Rosa resident Beth Eurotas-Steffy into the realm of senior advocacy where she has pushed for added protections for vulnerable adults like her mom, a resident in a assisted living facility in Fountaingrove, where dozens of residents were abandoned by staff.

Her and others’ work led the state to broaden liabilities for caretakers that abandon elderly patients, and state law requires skilled nursing facilities have backup power now, too.

But assisted living facilities like the one her mom lived in have largely been left out of the legislation.

She wants the state to expand requirements for backup power to those facilities, as well, and is studying the idea of requiring that residents with mobility issues be housed in rooms on the ground floor or near elevators for easier access in emergencies, she said.

“Sometimes looking backward is easier than looking forward and there have been some steps in the right direction but more work is needed,” she said. “I’m in here for the long haul, I’m just going to keep chipping away at it for my mom and all the other residents.”

Biggest lesson from 2017 fires

Like hundreds or even thousands of other survivors of the 2017 fires, Jessica Tunis has since moved, seeking some elusive refuge from flames.

The trauma of the 2017 firestorm, coupled with PG&E’s numerous power shut-offs during extreme weather and having to evacuate her Rincon Valley home during the Glass Fire, spurred her and her partner to move to Rohnert Park two years ago.

“It just became too much,” she said.

There are no overhead power lines near her home that could spark a fire, and if a fire starts on Sonoma Mountain, she has enough time to evacuate. She knows how close the nearest fire station is, has a go-bag packed in the hallway closet near the garage, and her phone is configured to receive emergency alerts.

“I had never paid attention to a red flag warning prior to 2017,” she said. “It’s sad that that’s how I think now.”

The couple considered moving out of Sonoma County — an option still on the table — but in some ways she feels tethered to the community through the bonds she has built with other families who share the same emotional burden as her, she said.

Tunis said she is “confident” the city and county have righted the mistakes made. Personally, she said the last five years have shown her how much she has healed and grown, too.

Still, she wants to see more work on communications during blazes and power failures, more testing of the alert system, and more awareness outside the region of the importance of emergency alerts and disaster planning.

“Sonoma County has learned the lesson, but the one thing you hope is that our tragedy will prevent other tragedies,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Paulina Pineda at 707-521-5268 or paulina.pineda@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @paulinapineda22.