Board of Supervisors — 2018-07-10

Thank you. Thank you. Okay, that's good.

I'll call this meeting to order. Roll call, please.

Ms. Wolfe?

Can you hear us, Janet? Can you hear us now, Janet? Hello, Santa Barbara.

Hi, we're here. Thank you.

We're doing the roll.

Can I get a motion on approval of the July 3rd minutes? So

moved.

Do we have to do even, all right. Roll call please.

Aye. Ms Hartman? Aye. Mr Adam? Aye. Mr Lavinino? Aye, Mr Williams? Aye Passes 5-0.

So just a matter of procedure for the audience in cases where there is a remote vote we have to do roll call on every vote so that's why you're not going to see all those in favor please say aye today it's gonna be a little different.

County CEO's report Good morning Chair Williams and board members. Today you're going to hear a report later this morning on an update on the holiday fire, so I believe Chair Williams will bring that item forward ahead of the agenda. But right now there are a couple announcements I have to make and that is related to the holiday fire. Yesterday the county along with our state and local agencies, non-profits and counselors and HOPE 805 opened a local assistance center at Goleta Union School District at 401 North Fairview. The center is open today until 7 PM and 9 AM to 7 PM tomorrow.

We will assess the community's needs but are ready to extend the center hours through the weekend. Also, the community is invited to hear from FEMA representatives about FEMA's interim advisory recovery map at a community meeting tomorrow July 11th at 530 PM at the Montecito Union School at 385 Sandy Cedar Road. The FEMA recovery map is available online at readysbc.org and at the Montecito Center. In addition, Senator Jackson and Assemblymember Monique Limon are hosting a public hearing this Thursday 4 to 6 PM at the Montecito Union School. County staff will give a presentation and update on the county's recovery strategic plan for Montecito similar to what we presented to the board about a month ago.

Lastly, to ensure public trust in our county government we with the Auditor-Controller's Office and Risk Management have launched a more robust mechanism for reporting and investigating suspected fraud waste and abuse of county resources or misconduct by county employees contractors or volunteers. It's called see it, report it, stop it. And it's available to employees and the general public via new website and hotline. We honor confidentiality thus individuals can report in the way they feel most comfortable without fear of retaliation. It's a 24-7 hotline and websites operated by a third party with bilingual support.

Issues that are reported will be given to the Internal Audit Division for investigation or referral. The toll-free number is 844-413-4025, and there is a link on our county website if you go to countyofsb.org under County Government, and there'll be a link to the employee intranet for employees. Thank you

Are there any items that the public wishes to strip from the agenda? CEO, are you asking that D6 we take up before the A items.

Yes please chair if you could take up the update on holiday fire which is D6.

So D6 just so that folks know if they're looking at the paper agenda it was a late added item so some of the paper agendas do not have it as D6 is on the holiday fire

Chair Williams, members of the board. Item six from the county executive office is a hearing to consider recommendations regarding the holiday fire ratification and proclamation about local emergency. And I just want to note that in the resolution that's referenced in recommendation A, in the second whereas of the resolution In the original copy that was distributed there was a mistake on a date it erroneously I mentioned December 6, 2017 in the resolution and that date is July 6, 2018. That's been corrected for the final copy.

Mr. Peterson? Mr. Lewin? Sheriff Brown? Rob?

Morning Chair Williams and Board Members, I'm Eric Peterson Fire Chief. I'm here today with Sheriff Brown, OEM Director Rob Lewin and our Division Chief Matt Ferris to give you a quick overview of the holiday fire and current situation status. So on July 6th we had red flag conditions very similar to the Painted Cave Fire of 1990 30 miles per hour, sustained winds gusts to 40. Single digit relative humidity and 100 degree heat in some cases well over 100 degrees.

Luckily, we had very good early weather information from the National Weather Service which we acted on. We put extra resources of our own on from county. CAL FIRE supported us with two bulldozers and crew in a water tender and because of new pre-positioning funding made available in the governor's supplemental budget, we were able to stage a strike team of five Cal OES engines.

We staged them at the corner of Hollister and Turnpike. And we kind of got lucky because that turned out to be a perfect spot for them to be pre-deployed for this incident, they were very close. When the fire started that strike team went to work I think within minutes So they were with the initial dispatch, so they were able to be used almost immediately. So upon arrival our first in battalion chief saw extreme wind driven fire behavior which was to be expected, ordered an additional immediate need five strike teams and within a half an hour we had an additional 14 fire engines on top of the first alarm response which is a lot of equipment in a very very short amount of time and I think that made it a very big difference Everything that we hear is that the evacuations were orderly and immediate, and the Sheriff's Department gets a lot of credit for that.

As you know rescues are always our priority over fire suppression and the fact that we didn't have to do rescues and we could focus on fire suppression was extremely important in this fire. As usual, we had great mutual aid support from the OP area. Every fire department in this county was involved in this thing from one degree or another everybody contributed.

I have to mention Ventura County Fire Department on the way into this fire. I got a call from their chief Mark Lorenzen. Asked what we needed and basically, we said we could use whatever you can give up. And at the end of the day, Ventura County contributed 15 fire engines, a hand crew and a bulldozer which was a heavy lift for them because they were under not great weather conditions either. So for them to give up that kind of equipment under those conditions was very much appreciated, and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

LA County contributed Black Hawk Night Flying Helicopter which can drop 1,000 gallons of water in one drop basically empty out one of our water tenders every time it takes off and fills up so that was important too on top of all the work our ASU crews did. And I think Sheriff Brown's gonna talk a little bit more about the work they did. Our type three incident management team took over the fire in the morning and set up in the incident command post at Dos Pueblos High School.

DP high, I have to mention has been key with all of these catastrophes that we continue to have in this county. They have provided a base camp for us that is ideally located and we have a really good relationship with them. We have now set up a contract with them through Cal Fire. So that's going to be seamless moving forward. Hopefully we won't need to invoke it.

At the height of this incident, we had 500 personnel and 75 fire engines on scene. So ultimately we had 100 acres burnt 10 homes lost three damaged these numbers are going to be updated a little bit this morning 14 out buildings destroyed I think we're calling it 95% containment now so those numbers have improved a little bit and the incident cost was Estimated by CAL FIRE to be about $1.5 million in suppression costs alone.

We have right now 22 people without power, we as always lament the loss of structures and Our heart goes out again to those people who are suddenly homeless. This fire could have been a lot worse and one of the reasons it was not worse was that we were able to cut it off at the top with some really, really good work by our dozer operators and I have Matt Ferris here today, our Division Chief, who can tell a little bit about that story so I'm going to turn over to Matt Ferris. Thank you.

Good morning. To play onto that, the dozer that we had pre-positioned was at our headquarters and that was immediately dispatched upon the first responders with the first engines going and his knowledge of this area is Mark Lennane Jr., and his knowledge of this area is impeccable you can't even compare it he knew exactly where to go and what to do And he deployed his other dozer on the other side of the fire as well. So, he went up Patterson unloaded and started cutting a fire break above the northern end of the fire. The importance of this is when we have down canyon sun downer winds they're blowing down Canyon obviously that wind will come back and push it back uphill. And when that happens it runs up to the top of the hill and then we get another sundowner and it blows back down taking out more homes.

So his forethought and what we did with the management team is cut that as one of our first priorities. It was so high, there's no recorded fire history there. Being able to go in there and fight direct fire was incredibly dangerous. He was calling in water drops on himself as he got down this steep hill just so he didn't burn up, and that's his dedication. He had the other dozer on the other side. The hills were so steep that he was watching it and guiding it and telling it it was pushing dirt so that he could not just roll over the side. So the way it works is you push dirt. It was Kyle Hill. And he push it, push it and then it kind of just rocks and pushed down. Well then at that point Mark's watching him said you're losing your dirt his dirt fell away.

Said raise your blade, raise your blade. At that moment he was able to raise his blade so we didn't topple over and then made its way all the way down the bottom. It's a one-way trip And once you get down there, the fire activity was so intense. They used the Nighthawk, the Firehawk from LA County that was there by 1215 just because we were in direct communication with a liaison from LA County at the ICP and they were there dropping 1000 gallons of water on him so that he didn't burn up in his other helicopter.

And just to tag on to that another story was his brother, Chris Lang is an engine company captain. He gets a phone call through dispatch or over the air we have people trapped at home. So his first thought as he goes in, the house is almost completely involved but he's goes in three separate times to go to try to rescue these people and He couldn't get him out or couldn't get anything out, come to find out the people that already left. Which he found out later through dispatch following back around but there's just a couple of stories that went on. We kept up fire to 100 acres which we're very lucky to do that with equipment we had I just wanted to pass on how important it is to have these fire breaks in place and how effective they really are because we don't have to put our people in such dangerous positions if we had some fire breaks that would allow us to do that.

Mr. Ferris, so this is a very interesting thing and maybe goes along with Chief Peterson's interest in military history. So what the Dozier team did instead of creating a break in the direction the fire was going they enveloped behind the fire to prevent it essentially from spreading- That's correct.

Later on in the evening. When you're in an urban interface The bulldozer is going that direction. There's too many homes, too many things that there are places that we can do but we could use other equipment when you have the other dozers coming in. But with the wind shift that we knew was coming at 3 a.m. with the weather service it was going to go back uphill and it was a critical piece and he was done by 3 a m with that piece And you

feel this made it instead of being a long, weeks-long slog where every day we have a shift and a fight. A fire that was a few days because of cutting off the fire?

It was a few days, 100 acres. Tragically, we lost 10 homes but it could have been easily 100 homes, 1,000 acres.

Okay,

thank you.

We have some photos for you to just see the intensity and the actions that were done by the fire department during it. It's interesting to note on some of these homes which appeared to have good adequate clearance following You know, what is expected for a wildland situation for homes and yet still the amber production from a wind-driven fire like this can cause problems. Still those are you know that can either occur by ember production that's falling into fuels such as even lawn furniture or wood piles or getting into vents and things like that and that's a difficult thing newer construction helps prevent a lot of that and also Making sure people are thinking about what's around their home, not just what it's built of and the clearance around it.

So couple of key facts that we want to share with you. The EOC activated by 10 o'clock that evening was very rapid for an EOC to open up that quickly. We asked for FMAG which stands for the Fire Management Assistance Grant And you have to do that during a going fire, the incident management team put together that document and the state awarded that very quickly that night.

Ms. Miyasato our County Executive Officer and Director of Emergency Services proclaimed a local emergency that night at 1 AM and then, and of course that's what's on your agenda now, and the Governor the next day proclaimed a State of Emergency. We have a principle, the fire department, the sheriff's office and OEM about evacuation. One of those principles is return people home as quickly as possible and not taking into consideration anything except is it safe for them to go home? So many people returned home, some of those people returned home before power was restored and they're still doing that because we'd still believe that the right thing to do is get them home and let them make the decision about whether they want to live in a home without power or not.

And so we did our first repopulation on July 7th, and then we fully repopulated the area on the 8th. We have asked, or we're going to be sending a letter as soon as we gather more data to the state asking for funding. The California Disaster Assistance Act funding and also for SBA funding. The SBA funding does have a threshold that we have not met. However, we're hopeful that because of our previous disasters as well as the other fires that are occurring in California, that will be made available so we'll be making that effort. Our County Ag Commissioner is now out in the field today, gathering data on ag damages.

Next slide. The sheriff and I are going to talk a little bit about alerting because we know that's a concern to the public. First of all, I want to say that Missing my slide here. The the aware and prepare that look so this is the sheriff's line. I'm sorry, Sheriff.

All right, thank you. Good morning I'm going to give you a briefing on some of the alert issues and also some of the involvement of the Sheriff's Office in this incident. The incident broke out at about 840 p.m., and that's when the first calls were received in our 911 center. The dispatchers were inundated with emergency calls that evening To give you an indication and idea of what it was like, we had six people working that night as supervisor and five dispatchers.

And within the first half hour from between 830 and 9 o'clock really for about the first 20 minutes in terms of when this fire actually broke out The dispatch center received 98 9-1-1 calls. The week before, during that same time period they received 4 9- 1-1 calls. So you can just see there's this crush of calls that come in when something like this occurs.

In the next half hour from nine o'clock until 930 there were 45 calls the week before there had been four And from 930 to 10 there were 32 week before they've been five. So in that time frame, there were 175 911 calls the week before during the same time period there had been 13. A request came out for evacuations. Immediately, sheriff's deputies responded and sheriff's deputies and search-and-rescue members who were off duty were called in to assist and participate in those evacuations. There were door-to-door evacuations conducted almost immediately The fire was a big one and at night obviously lit up the entire area and a lot of people were getting the message and understanding what was going on without having to be told to evacuate.

All told, we estimate that about 3200 people We're in the area that was ultimately affected by the evacuation zone and out of that, we estimate at least 22 to 2500 of them actually did evacuate subsequent to being notified. And the remainder many of them obviously had self evacuated and some did actually choose to stay and did stay within the within the area.

There were some dramatic moments as well involving some of the sheriff's deputies. In one instance, a patrol car sucked in a burning ember into the engine compartment and the engine caught on fire. The deputies spotted this, were able to stop, get the hood open, get the fire extinguisher out and did extinguish the fire. Vehicle was still operational and they continued back in the fight, and continued to go. In the Whittier fire a year previously with the same thing that occurred and we actually lost a vehicle it was totally destroyed by fire.

The LED lights on the push bar of one of our pickup trucks were completely melted to give you an idea of how close the deputies were to this incident. We had a total of 78 sheriff's personnel and 20 search-and-rescue personnel that came out and responded to this incident. In addition to that, we had mutual aid assistance from Santa Barbara Police Department from the UC Police Department, UC Santa Barbara Police Department and also from the Ventura Police Department in the Ventura Sheriff's Office.

We had San Luis Obispo sheriff that was actually responding and actually were canceled we had enough people at that point so it was a All hands on deck type effort, as you can imagine. Our air support unit was activated. We only had one helicopter that was capable of making night drops with night vision goggles. That was Copter 3. It has a built-in tank. We don't fly missions that involve the Bambi bucket drops at night so the only one that could fly was Copter 3 Copter 3 got into the fight and ended up making 17 water drops that evening while they were on the ground refueling at Santa Barbara Airport. They noticed they had a hydraulic leak and ended up ultimately having to ground the aircraft as a result of that.

As you heard, fortunately the L.A. Fire Department sent us one of their firehawks and the firehawk continued throughout the evening to make nighttime water drops as well so this was a classic instance of one of the few areas in the United States where nighttime water drops were made on a fire Getting back to the alert process, the Sheriff's Office sent out an Aware and Prepare Alert. And I just wanted to clarify that there is a little bit of a misunderstanding. Aware and Prepare is the program that people sign up to get alerts on but Aware and Prepare actually encompasses many different mechanisms for people to get messages. They get them by email, by text, by phone calls to landline and the cell phones that are pre-recorded and these are all done through a GeoFence technology where we can actually draw a line around the area where we want calls that are made either landlines or to cell phones that are registered within that area The Nixle alerts are also part of that and go out to people.

In this case, the Nixle alert went out to the entire Goleta community. And the community members who were in the epicenter really or close to the epicenter of the fire were immediately evacuated and alerted in person on a door-to-door basis if they were still home. You can see the map there shows the initial area of the notification was the red zone there and then the subsequent evacuation zone that was put together is the larger green rectangle.

And as I mentioned, we continuously updated through social media and one major asset to this in this fire was the local media's response. KUIT in particular did a magnificent job of getting the message out and it was a pretty spectacular looking fire as I'm sure most of you who saw it saw by By the fact that they had a helicopter come up from Los Angeles that was giving aerial shots that showed these simultaneous structure fires and vegetation fire that was going on at the moment.

We did have an issue that came up, When the alerting process is put together, there's a sort of check-the-box form on the alert. One of which is a WEA alert, which is the federal system and as a result of the crush of calls that had come in to dispatch, dispatch had called An off-duty dispatch supervisor to make that notification, and he did that from his home.

But he did not have the code that was required for the WEA alert so he did not want to delay getting that message out. He ultimately did send the alert short of the WEA alert but it had all the other platforms that I just mentioned to you that went out. And then subsequently communicated with the people at OEM once the Emergency Operations Center was set up and there was a delay in getting out a second WEA alert that may have been due to some equipment issues in terms of the extreme heat that occurred and involved servers over at the EOC.

So that's it, I'll be happy to answer any questions at the end if you like and I'll turn it back over to Rob.

Supervisor Hartman?

I had a couple of questions Sheriff Brown. First of all, it seems overall that with the red flag alert we were pre-staged, we were ready and that made a huge difference. Do we do that in dispatch as well?

We did not. We had a normal complement of dispatchers and sheriff's deputies that were working, and I think part of that is probably due to the fact that the funding that's available for pre-staging is really dedicated towards fire resources.

But it might be something we would think about for the future if

we know. And Friday is normally a busy night anyway so we typically had six people on duty and then about an hour into the event, normally and on this evening as well that was up staffed by two more positions. So there were eight people total as a result of about nine o'clock.

And I had one more question about WEA. It was, the federal government was making some adjustments to this system because it was overly broad, the notification. Have those changes been made?

They have. The ability with WEA is to do it county-wide, city-wide or it can be done more specifically. Rob has more expertise and info on that that he could probably give you some information

Chair and Supervisor, yes the WEA now they've not told us that there was a change in the ability to do geofencing. However we have found that the last WEAs that we've done during the previous emergencies during the previous evacuations for storms in March as well as this one that were finding that in fact it is isolated now down to its specific geography that we draw on these maps We're not exactly sure if that was a change by the cellular companies or if pressure from FCC, we're not sure exactly what's happening with that. We have tried to communicate with cell companies now to try and understand that better.

Please continue and then we'll go to Supervisor Wolf if she has any questions.

Just a question about the WEA. Is that just the alarm, the noise or is it also text and has if I remember the text was limited in terms of language and characters? And so could you talk about that as well?

Chair and Supervisor yes that's correct it's limited to 90 characters. The FCC has stated that they're going to change that in November of 2019 Chair, did you want me to continue or? Sure. Okay. Please continue. On the alerting of the second alerting that went out at midnight 21, at this point we knew that the evacuation was complete so when this one went out it was really more to make sure that community had clarification because there was not a clarity about what the evacuation boundaries were however on the ground The evacuation had occurred, control points had been established by the deputies.

The previous alert hadn't been very effective other than the fact that we didn't have the WEA out. So that one went out at midnight 21. The sheriff mentioned that we had some trouble with our server. We'd had trouble all day with overheating in our server room. However, the only delay that really caused was probably about 15 minutes. I don't want to state that there was a delay longer than that because of it.

So on the next slide, can you go back to the previous slide? I want you to see that on this particular map it includes a larger area than the previous map. It includes all of the area that was included in the evacuation area and as the sheriff said people have concern of why they didn't receive an alert oftentimes it's merely because they're outside of this area.

And that's really the simple reason for it. We've gotten quite a few emails from people saying, I live south of Cathedral Oaks. How come I didn't hear anything? And this is the reason as we target the area. One of the reasons we target the areas to try to reduce the amount of impact on our dispatch centers from people calling and wondering if they're supposed to evacuate. This we're finding is balancing act of people wanting to know and also not creating an impact. And we often struggle with that balance of how to do that.

Next slide, please. Learning improvements. So we are learning all the time and the sheriff's office in the fire department and OEM are committed to working together to review our methods and to come up with ways that we can do things. Some of the problems that we have are the communication between the field and the dispatch center in the field and the EOC. And we're going to be committed to coming up with procedures that are adjusted to this new technology so the importance of getting it out We're also committed to reviewing our communication amongst each other, as I said. And then we also want to make sure that because dispatch does alerting as well as OEM, that our policies and procedures are coordinated and aligned in all fashions.

I want to say that this is hard. We're doing something that's very difficult and I want to assure you that it isn't from lack of trying, that we're not trying to get right. We work really hard all of us all the agencies work really hard to try to make sure we're getting this right It's what we're doing that we need to work on, it isn't from lack of effort. The other part I wanted to make sure we understand is that we're trying to balance accuracy and expedience.

And if we are too accurate, it takes too long. If we're too expedient, it can cause inaccuracies. Some of the things that we're looking at changing and improving are quickly getting out just a 90 character message that says something like there's a wildfire in your area. Take action if needed. Something very short that just gets the word out quickly, but it will not have much accuracy obviously. So we'll look at that and we'll see what the ramifications of that are.

People in the community have different expectations. All of them, some want more information, some want to opt out of our system because they're getting overwhelmed by it. And that's the other part of the balance we're trying to strike. So we're going to do that. We're going to keep trying to strike the right balance in our efforts here. Next slide please. I want to talk about the, I'm sorry it was a lack slide next or?

Okay, our local assistance center opened up yesterday at noon and I know that Supervisor Williams and Supervisor Wolf both were there as well as Congressman Carbajal and several county elected city elected folks were there. We appreciate that very much. I know the community does. At this point all of the people who have lost their homes have been to the local assistance center and are getting assistance there whatever it is that we can do for them The center is staffed by many state agencies and local agencies. And there are all, and many behavioral wellness counselors as well as 805 HOPE folks are there too. This is the beginning of the recovery process for those people. We're all now quite familiar with recovery as we've all been through it in this county now over our last disasters.

And these folks were committed to making sure that they get the same level of service that we provided for our other disasters. Even though it's much smaller, These people have been impacted and we know that the county cares, and we're going to do our very best for them. When the EOC opened at 10 o'clock that evening, the JIC opened as well. We were very prompt in getting people into our joint information center and providing as much information as we can. We're doing that through all means of communication and we also were using Spanish translators to try to get everything translated into Spanish right away.

And then of course, we're all available for questions.

I'm going to give Supervisor Wolfe an opportunity first because she's in remote testimony. Supervisor

Wolfe? Thank you, Mr. Chair. Can the sheriff come back up? Sheriff, I have a couple questions I wanted to ask you. You said Copter 3 was out the evening when the fire started and then we had the LA copter come the next day. Do we not have any other copters that would've been available that evening or the next day?

Supervisor Wolf to the chair, we have two other medium lift helicopters in our inventory. One is copter four, it is a helicopter that is not equipped with an integral tank. Which means that it utilizes a Bambi bucket for firefighting and that can only fly during hours of daylight. So although that aircraft was available, it was not the type of aircraft we could use during the evening.

The other medium lift helicopter

is... Excuse me but you could have used it during the day?

Correct.

I just want to be clear.

Yeah, and in fact it was flown down to Santa Barbara Airport and it was available on the morning of the 7th but it was not assigned any duties by that time the fire had been knocked down substantially and it didn't have any mission at that point. And then the other helicopter is 308 which is the Fire Department Huey helicopter, it was down in Van Nuys actually getting a integral tank installed on it but it was not available the evening of the fire.

Okay thank you for that. The other question I have is the notification process from when your folks are getting calls into dispatch At what point did the Sheriff's Department notify the OEM or Mr. Lewin about what was going on? Because it seems, if you can just answer that question.

I don't, Supervisor Wolf through the chair. I don't know an exact time. I know that the we alert was put out at 914 and I know that in subsequent conversations I've had with Director Lewin while he was en route from his residence to the fire he actually called the dispatch center and was put in touch with a supervisor and that was sometime before his arrival But I'm not sure what the exact timing is. Sometime between 915 and 10 o'clock.

Okay, and the WEA alert you just said went out at 914? I thought that there wasn't an alert put out by the Sheriff's Department because of some problem that occurred.

An alert was put out but the WEA component was not included. In other words, the alert that went out was a Nixle alert, it was the text messaging, emails, the Everbridge direct phone calls to landlines and cell phones that were in the evacuation area The WEA component was not part of it because the supervisor who put the alert out, put it out from home. He had been called because of the call inundation in the dispatch center. He had been called and asked to do it but he did not have the codes available With him at his disposal, and he did not want to delay putting the other messaging out. So he put all of the rest of it out but the WEA alert did not get put out. There was a wear and prepare umbrellaed alert that went out but the WEA component did not go out.

And this is something that we're concerned about and we're working to try to address that to make sure that does go out in a timely fashion.

Okay, thank you for that because when you said it went out at 914 I was confused but you've clarified that. I know that you talk about this 9-14 timeframe, but I know that I received alerts earlier than that. And I actually was pleased when I saw those alerts because the evacuation in one of them was very clear. It was north of Cathedral Oaks between Foothill and Patterson.

Then I received another alert that said everything north of Cathedral Oaks, which was very confusing and didn't comport with the earlier alert or notification. So who, Sheriff Brown is responsible for those alerts? The ones that I received and I'm sure other people received earlier than the 914 alert

Supervisor Wolf, I don't know what you received before 9-14 but to my knowledge there was no official alert that went out from the Santa Barbara County Dispatch Center prior to that. The only thing that I'm aware of is that there is some kind of a private system and I don'y know if you're tied into that but there's some kind of a private system for Residents who live on the extreme west side of Goleta that I understand they had some kind of a system where they linked messages and sent messages out to people that there was a fire. But, to my knowledge-

And I'm not. And I'm not part of that. The notices that I got were OEM notices, and I understand now that those were initiated by the sheriff. And in fact, I spoke to and texted the notifications to CEO Miyasato. Let me just say this in closing without getting into the weeds on this. I think that the most important fact is that we had no loss of lives, and I think that is certainly due to the efforts of the Sheriff's Department and the Fire Department. There is no doubt about that.

What I'm concerned about is this, and I think you folks have talked about it in your slide that there's going to be a look at improving the system. But I think this is something and I've mentioned it to CEO Miyasato that has to happen immediately because this type of problem with someone not knowing the code or Any kind of delay in my mind is unacceptable, particularly when we're talking about mandatory evacuation. So the area initially between Foothill and Patterson was mandatory evacuation.

And the messages didn't come out timely and they were conflicting. So I'm hoping that in the recommendation that all of you are going to be working together to develop better protocols, I think that's obviously something that we need and we need it immediately. And I would suggest to CEO Miyasato that you come back to the board and report on this and the improvements that we're going to be making We know that fire season is all year round, but particularly right now in the summer it's even more intense. And frankly I worry about other emergencies that we don't really think about too well aren't on our minds such as earthquakes and so forth.

So we need to get our system, we've got great people. We've got a great technology. We just need to bring it all together so we don't have this happen again. But in closing I'm very appreciative to our staff and And I wanna say to situational awareness amongst the citizens in this area who are all too familiar with fire danger, who were alert. Obviously there was a community notification that seemed to help but I know from a lot of constituents that they were concerned that they were not notified by the county and we really need to work on that. Thank you Mr Chair.

Can I just respond to that too? Of course. Supervisor Wolf, I certainly share your concern and we are as indicated by Director Lewin, we are working to improve this system and make it the best it can be but we have to all bear in mind that there is A human element that is involved in this. It takes time for calls to be made to a dispatch center, it takes time for response to be made to the scene by sheriff and fire personnel. They have to evaluate the situation they have to convey that back to dispatch. Dispatch has to begin a lengthy process of notifying people who are off duty and getting a sufficient emergency response to go to it. And then when the messaging, the alerting system is sent out that message has to be composed an evacuation area has to be determined and it has to be put out and although it may seem like 914 was a lengthy delay from the origin of the fire.

It actually, for that part of the message and for that component of what happened, it's really not. It was actually done in a fairly timely manner. Now as Director Lewin said we may look at this in trying to get some much more general notification out, but on the same token we want people to be notified in the areas that are of concern. We don't want people to be unduly panicked and especially have them call our and flood our dispatch center with calls so that all has to be balanced in terms of how we approach a situation like this.

Thank you Sheriff Brown and I'm keenly aware of that and It wasn't just the 914 alert. We had earlier alerts and there was some inconsistencies, and also some people in the evacuation area didn't get the information.

Excuse me, Supervisor Wolfe again to my knowledge there were no alerts before 914. You're welcome to call me and send me whatever it is that you received but I don't want people to think that there were other alerts that somehow went out that were from the emergency operations center or from the dispatch center because to my knowledge and I believe to my colleagues' knowledge there were none.

Supervisor

Adam? If I could, just to respond. Sure. I will get you that information and also as you complimented the media, I think they did play an important part in fact KEYT prior to 914 issued something on their Facebook about the evacuation.

Supervisor Adam?

Well, as Chief Peterson's coming up I will just say if you would please. That was your cue to come up. I will just say that I was glad up in Orchid that we didn't get the... You guys seem to have filtered that thing down and maybe it's a little tight who knows but I think From the sounds of things, it went pretty well and there is sort of a as well as can be expected under the circumstances standard here. And I think we're getting closer and you guys will refine it as time goes on and I'm sure everybody's doing the best they can.