With a major wildfire, a tsunami warning and extreme heat, Santa Barbara County’s Office of Emergency Management has had a busy few weeks.

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors recognized that effort by declaring August as Emergency Management Awareness Month. 

“We have a good planning infrastructure here in our county, and it makes me sleep better at night knowing what an experienced professional set of emergency managers we do have,” Supervisor Joan Hartmann said.

The work of the OEM, a division of the Fire Department, was recently highlighted for the Gifford Fire, during which staff provided crucial public information, coordinated evacuations and managed a call center for residents’ questions.

“Public education is a really big one,” said Jackie Ruiz, an OEM communications coordinator. “We have to educate our community about the alert system and about how to prepare themselves individually for a disaster.”

OEM operates ReadySBC.org, which provides incident information, tips on preparedness and signups for the county’s emergency alert system.

The response to the Gifford Fire drew praise from Supervisor Roy Lee, who told OEM staff that their work “really made a difference in the Cuyama community.”

The recognition comes as the county recently upgraded its Emergency Operations Center. The EOC at 4408 Cathedral Oaks Road has a larger Joint Information Center, which is a critical piece of the county’s emergency response.

“The JIC, which includes the call center, is one of the first or sometimes only sections to activate (during an incident),” Ruiz said. “We’re usually the last to deactivate because the need for public information is so great.”

The JIC is staffed with specially trained county and city employees, known as disaster service workers, who are reassigned from their regular duties. Its response scales to the needs of the incident, Ruiz said. 

During the Gifford Fire, the county activated the Joint Information Center with about five operators. OEM closed it on Aug. 8 after the fire’s primary impact shifted to San Luis Obispo County and local call volume dwindled.

In contrast, Ruiz noted that at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the call center scaled up to 26 operators handling as many as 1,000 calls per day.

The EOC neighbors the new Regional Fire Communications Center, which centralizes fire and medical dispatch for county agencies. It enables what officials call “borderless dispatch” to send the closest available crews to an emergency, regardless of the crew’s assigned agency.

The OEM also coordinates the response to technological failures, and it activated the EOC during the countywide 9-1-1 outage last month to issue critical public safety alerts.

Beyond incident response, the OEM focuses on year-round preparedness.

“We form partnerships that become alliances,” OEM Director Kelly Hubbard said, pointing to a recent effort with Direct Relief to deliver free N95 masks during the Gifford Fire.

County officials urge residents to sign up for the free emergency alerts and find preparedness resources at ReadySBC.org.

To ensure those alerts are received, Ruiz stressed a key detail for registration: Use full street names such as “Figueroa Mountain Road” instead of abbreviations such as “Fig Mtn Rd.” She said it’s a common error that can cause alerts not to be delivered.