North Bay lawmakers have introduced a bill to bolster the ability of emergency officials to contact residents who may be in harm's way — a topic that has been scrutinized since last year's devastating Napa and Sonoma County wildfires.
The legislation, introduced by multiple lawmakers, including state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, would create uniform statewide emergency notification protocols. It also would require all counties to develop and adopt guidelines for using Wireless Emergency Alerts, a federally administered system that can send Amber Alert-style messages to cellphones in a disaster area.
Many North Bay residents said they received no official warning and were blindsided by the rapidly spreading flames that sparked in multiple counties in October.
Some experts said that statewide systems can be useful for regional or large-scale disasters, but that in smaller incidents, notification decisions are often better left to local leaders.
"They know their infrastructure the best; they know their resource and responsibility the best," said Troy Harper, the general manager of OnSolve, which provides the technology behind many emergency notification programs nationwide, including Sonoma County's.
One of the bill's authors, Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, said the legislation will establish notification standards and expectations — along with protocols for how to achieve them — but he expects there will be some flexibility for local emergency managers.
California counties currently use a patchwork of systems during a disaster to warn people in imminent danger, which include calling landlines or cellphones, sending text or email messages, or sounding physical sirens. Many of those systems require people to sign up to get a message on their cellphones or computers.
Recent upgrades implemented after the North Bay fires will make wireless alerts more precise and increase text character length.
"With enhanced geo-targeting capabilities, the county welcomes the efforts of the California Legislature to standardize emergency alerts for the benefit of our communities and visitors," said Sonoma County spokeswoman Jennifer Larocque. "Any redundancy we can build into our alert system — whether that be alerts to cellphones, sirens, landlines, social media, radio and TV — will increase our ability to send critical information to our residents."
The proposed legislation would create standards for when counties should use the wireless alert system and require that notifications be sent through multiple channels, including both landlines and cellphones. It's unclear where the funding would come from.
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