Going into the winter storm season, Santa Barbara County is changing its emergency-alerting protocols in an effort to notify more people, more quickly of developing incidents.
Emergency managers last week gave an update to the Board of Supervisors on the county’s Aware & Prepare alerts and other notification methods, including Wireless Emergency Alerting (WEA) messages.
Only 12 percent of people countywide, or 52,850 residents, are signed up to receive emergency alerts, according to Assistant County Executive Officer Terri Nisich. About 10 percent of residents are signed up for Nixle alerts.
“It tells us we have more work to do to get folks signed up in our system,” Nisich said.
Supervisor Joan Hartmann called the 12 percent registration rate abysmal, and county leaders hope to boost that number by using utility company account information to automatically sign up people for alerts, which recent legislation approved.
County leaders also are working to improve emergency messaging so people respond appropriately to alerts, taking action to prepare and evacuate when they need to, said Rob Lewin, director of the county Office of Emergency Management.
They’re embracing the Ready! Set! Go! wildfire preparedness model for storms, and the OEM will send out weather advisories, evacuation warnings and evacuation orders in advance of potentially dangerous storms that could cause debris flows in recent burn areas.
Gone are the words “voluntary” and “mandatory” related to evacuation notices, Nisich said.
City/area Residents registered for Aware & Prepare alerts Buellton 11.6% Carpinteria 30.1% Casmalia 0.9% Goleta & Isla Vista 19.3% Guadalupe 1.1% Lompoc & Vandenberg 5.7% Los Alamos 9% Los Olivos 12.4% New Cuyama 0.2% Montecito 55% Santa Barbara 25.6 % Santa Maria & Orcutt 25.8% Solvang 15.3% Summerland 68.4% Santa Ynez 11%
Survey results after the July Holiday Fire told the county that people want information about incidents such as wildfires even if they are not directly impacted or in the evacuation zone, and that many people thought they were signed up for alerts but may not have been.
“There is a lot of confusion out in the community, and that’s something we need to address,” Nisich said.
The county’s new emergency alerting protocols put dispatchers on the front line of making notifications to the public for incidents in unincorporated areas, which is where most people were affected during the recent Thomas Fire, Whittier Fire, Alamo Fire and Montecito debris flows.
During a disaster response, it typically takes an hour or two to activate the Emergency Operation Center and Joint Information Center, and it’s Santa Barbara-based county dispatchers who send out the earliest emergency alerts, according to Lewin.
Dispatchers as well as fire and sheriff responders in the field have gone through recent trainings on the alert protocols, which have incident commanders determine whether and where evacuations are needed and notify dispatch, which sends out the alerts.
“It’s a culture shift for them,” Undersheriff Sol Linver said, adding that dispatchers are trained to make sure they answer 9-1-1 calls quickly, and that now someone needs to break away from the calls to send out an alert.
“They’ve done a good job adapting to that,” and they practice weekly and with unannounced exercises, he said.
The 9-1-1 calltakers get flooded during disasters, and during the Holiday Fire, 90 percent of the callers were asking for information, sheriff’s department spokeswoman Kelly Hoover said.
In cases where the callers are not in danger, dispatchers may hang up so that important calls such as a heart attack don’t go unanswered, according to dispatch supervisor Joe Ayala.
The public’s desire to talk to someone during emergencies also has been shown in the thousands of calls to the county’s 2-1-1 information line, and the Emergency Operations Center’s call center set up during the Thomas Fire and Montecito debris flows.
“I thought the time of call centers were kind of passé, but nope, they want to talk to a person,” Lewin said.
In response to feedback from recent disasters, the county plans to send out quick, general notifications first — such as, “There is a wildfire in the Goleta area; be aware and take precautions to stay safe” — and then followup messages to target people who need to shelter in place, evacuate or take other action.
“Any time anyone feels unsafe, they should take immediate action and not wait for notification to evacuate,” Nisich said.
Ayala said at a recent Emergency Public Information Communicators meeting that members of the public want to know “what the big scary thing is, what they need to do about it and where they can go for more information.”
Dispatchers typically send out a WEA alert first to let people know something happened, then utilize the Aware & Prepare alerts to send texts and emails, and, lastly, send robo-calls to landlines and cell phones, according to Ayala.
“The important thing to remember here is that the more contact methods they enter into the system (text, email, cell, landline, etc.), the better the chance that we will be able to reach them in an emergency,” OEM Emergency Manager Brian Uhl said.
People can choose the preference of how they are reached — email first, for example — and the Everbridge system will keep trying to reach people via different methods until someone “confirms” they received the message, he noted.
Recent state legislation from Assemblywoman Monique Limon, D-Santa Barbara, says emergency communications must be available in the second most spoken language in a county, and CalOES is working on prepared messaging to use statewide, Lewin said.
Nisich said that making sure information goes out in English and Spanish is at the “top of our list.”
While there typically are people available to translate and interpret materials once the EOC is activated, it doesn’t always happen before that.
Ayala noted that just two of the county’s dispatchers are bilingual, and there is work to do on getting translated information out quickly.
“This is not just a unique problem to us; this is a statewide problem,” Lewin said of providing emergency communications in multiple languages.
Types of emergency alerts available and how to sign up
The county used Nixle and robo-calls to landlines before 2016, when it launched the Everbridge software that’s the base of Aware & Prepare text, email and robo-call emergency alerts.
“We utilize every possible alerting method except for sirens; we use ‘em all,” Lewin said at a recent meeting of the Emergency Public Information Communicators.
The county has issued more than 330 emergency alerts in the past 12 months and is the sixth-largest user of WEA alerts in the United States, he added.
The WEAs target all cellphones in a specified geographic area without requiring any kind of signup, but messages have a 90-character limit.
The county also can use the Emergency Alert System to interrupt local radio and television station programing with emergency broadcasts. A list of the participating radio stations is online here.
Residents can register for Aware & Prepare emergency alerts from Santa Barbara County by visiting the ReadySBC.org website or AwareAndPrepare.org and click on the red button that states, “Register for Alerts.”
To confirm registration for Aware & Prepare, visit the ReadySBC.org website or AwareAndPrepare.org. Click on the hyperlink below the red “Register for Alerts” button to get to the login page.
Sign in using the username and password created at registration to check and change preferences. OEM staff can be reached during normal business hours at 805.681.5526 or oem@sbcoem.org, but Uhl encourages people to try to log in before contacting OEM with questions.
The Nixle system sends 138-character messages, and residents can sign up by texting their ZIP code to the number 888777.
Click here for a list of resources, including how to sign up for alerts and where to find city-specific emergency information.
The revised debris flow risk maps for recent burn areas from the Thomas Fire and Whittier Fire are available on the county’s emergency website, ReadySBC.org, in addition to winter storm preparedness materials.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.