Sonoma County’s Latino leaders stepped up to inform community during fires

About eight hours into the 2017 firestorm that would besiege Sonoma County for three weeks, deputy county counsel Alegría De La Cruz looked around the county's emergency operations center and saw what was missing.

Dozens of county employees were examining maps, answering phones and launching what would become a permanent logistical command center for the unfolding disaster. But no one was there to communicate urgent information to Spanish-speaking residents. De La Cruz went to her boss, Sonoma County's top attorney, Bruce Goldstein, and asked to change roles.

“I need to not be a lawyer today, I need to be a public information officer, I need to be a translator,” De La Cruz recalled saying.

Within minutes, calls into the disaster hotline from Spanish speakers were being forwarded to her cellphone. It was about daybreak. Smoke choked the skies, and people needed to know how to protect themselves from a half-dozen major infernos burning throughout the region.

Over the next days and weeks, alerts and warnings would be issued in both English and Spanish, while Santa Rosa hosted press conferences entirely in Spanish and bilingual volunteers were posted at evacuation shelters and assistance centers.

But in the earliest hours of the fires, there was little in place to communicate with the approximately 20 percent of Latinos in Sonoma County who speak little to no English - roughly 26,000 people, according to a 2017 demographics report by the county Economic Development Board.

The fires tested Sonoma County's mettle and preparedness on a variety of fronts, and sharpened local agencies' abilities to communicate quickly and efficiently with everyone, including Spanish speakers.

In September, the city of Santa Rosa conducted a trial run of the government's wireless emergency alert system - which it didn't have access to in October 2017 - to see how well local governments can warn the public about disasters through cellphone text messages.

One of the areas targeted was the Roseland neighborhood in southwest Santa Rosa, home to a large Latino community. For people in Roseland, the first message went out in Spanish followed by another in English.

Santa Rosa Assistant Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal said while the alerts are imperfect - short in length at 90 characters and hit-and-miss in reaching all cellphones because of limits by service providers - it's a way to get initial information out quickly while the city musters the full capacity of its emergency response.

“We had 7,000 structures on fire within four hours. It's hard to have a system in place to deal with something on that scale in that period of time,” Lowenthal said. “There's always the challenge: How to bring all your tools in all at once in the middle of the night?”

Like De La Cruz, hundreds of Spanish-speaking community leaders in Sonoma County stepped up in large and small ways to help get urgent information to people during the fires.

Jenny Chamberlain, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Sonoma County and district director for Board of Supervisors Chairman James Gore, was woken up by a message sent through Nixle, an opt-in information service used by many local agencies, including Santa Rosa police. The message was alarming: Fountaingrove was on fire.

She called to wake up Gore and dug into that night's work, getting the messages out to people who needed to evacuate about shelters and services. At some point Chamberlain realized there was “nothing going out in Spanish.”

She sent a message to Hispanic chamber members and within hours she had a database of volunteers able to translate verbally or in writing. Over the coming days and weeks that list would grow to include about 1,000 names, mostly local residents but also volunteers from far-flung places, including certified translators from language schools in South America.

“The city of Santa Rosa would say, ‘We need 10 people for a phone bank in 15 minutes,'” Chamberlain said. “I would text people, ‘This area needs verbal translators' and people would just jump up, ‘I can be there in 15 minutes.'”

One of the local volunteers was Neil Pacheco, a Windsor resident who works as a host at Graton Resort and Casino near Rohnert Park and teaches hospitality through the Sonoma County Office of Education.

While driving home about 11:30 p.m. from his casino shift that first night, Pacheco had seen the glow of the fires east of Fountaingrove. He wouldn't go to sleep that night and didn't return to work the next day, instead spending hours translating messages coming from the Sheriff's Office into Spanish and sending those out through social media networks.

He heard Latino families in the hundreds were fleeing to the Sonoma Coast, too fearful of federal immigration officers to show up at government sanctioned evacuation shelters. So he drove to Doran Beach, where he spent days helping link people with local services and the Mexican Consulate.

“For people who lost everything, they were looking for food, they were looking for clothes, they were looking for emotional support,” Pacheco said. “The help arrived slowly.”

The fires proved Sonoma County has a strong network of Spanish speakers poised to respond, and people like Pacheco and Chamberlain say they need to build on the informal networks cobbled together last year to create a more robust emergency response for Spanish-speaking communities. Chamberlain still has that long list of volunteers and she wants to find a central place to hone and maintain it for the next emergency.

“A big group of Latino community leaders wanted to help each other without knowing where we were heading, what was the right direction - and we learned a lot,” Pacheco said. “We need to be prepared for these types of events, like an earthquake. We need to get communities and organizations doing drills so they're prepared.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.