While the hours-long manhunt was underway for the suspects in the December 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department was determined to respond in real-time and to use social media to address the crisis quickly.

“Twitter information was extremely important,” Cindy Bachman, the department’s public information officer, explained to a small group of Santa Barbara County officials last week. “It saved us. We needed to get the information out timely and accurately.”

Fourteen people were killed and 22 were seriously injured in the shooting and attempted bombing at the Inland Regional Center, where county Public Health Department employees were having a combination training and Christmas party.

The ISIS-inspired attack by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, ended in a shootout after nearly two dozen police officers cornered the couple on a residential street not far from the massacre scene. Both suspects were killed in a hail of gunfire.

“It was a horrific event,” Bachman recalled. “We hadn’t seen anything like this since the Sept. 11 attacks — that many people killed by a terrorist attack.”

On Thursday, the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department hosted a seminar designed to give more than 30 attendees a chance to hear firsthand how San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials managed communication with the public during and after the attack on Dec. 2, 2015.

It was offered as a meeting for the county’s Emergency Public Information Communicators group, or EPIC.

Santa Barbara County created a security committee after the San Bernardino massacre and has plans for enhanced safety measures, including employee identification badges, more lighting and protected entrances to some county buildings.

Four San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department employees presented an informative lecture to a local group that included representatives from the Santa Barbara County sheriff’​s and fire departments, UC Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara Unified School District, the American Red Cross and other agencies and organizations.

Bachman, who has been the San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokeswoman for 20 years, talked about logistics in the middle of a rapidly evolving crisis, as did Lt. Brad Toms, social media specialist Brittany Rios and Sgt. Vicki Cervantes.

“This wasn’t about us,” Toms said. “It was about the community and victims.”

When law enforcement sprang into action, Toms said the Sheriff’s Department immediately developed and then followed a crisis communication plan.

He said the best defense was preparation and role-playing exercises with command and control systems in emergency management. Authorities wanted to ensure that community safety was the top priority during the attack.

“We created a plan to help prepare for incidents like this, and it helped us,” said Toms, a 27-year SBCSD veteran. “We immediately offered our assistance and communicated 24/7.”

After dispatchers received the first reports of gunfire at the government center at 10:58 a.m. that day, Cervantes immediately went to the scene to respond as the department’s spokeswoman.

“It’s my job to protect,” she explained. “We have shootings all the time in San Bernardino, but there was a lot of chaos. It brings up emotions hearing (the 9-1-1 dispatch calls) all over again.”

The department turned to social media to respond and communicate information quickly — and internationally.

Rios, whose primary duty is managing the department’s social media accounts, said the prevalence of such platforms practically forces their integration into community and crisis situations.

Bachman said communication was a joint coordination between the Sheriff’s Department, San Bernardino police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Homeland Security Department.

“We wanted to keep everyone involved so we were working as a team,” she said.

“We met every hour, and the community embraced it and felt that we cared about their safety. The No. 1 priority was getting the information out, and we did everything we could with every resource.”

San Bernardino County covers more than 20,000 square miles of land, making it the largest county in the United States. It is the fifth largest county in terms of population with more than 2 million people, according to the 2010 census.

— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.