Sonoma County shares lessons learned from 2017 Tubbs Fire

Seven years after a devastating fire that killed 40 people and saw thousands evacuated from their homes, Sonoma County, Calif. Emergency Management offi­cials shared solutions they have carved out from that disaster.

Sam Wallis, Sonoma County’s deputy director of emergency management, explained those hard lessons in planning for, and recovering from the fire. 

“I want to emphasize the im­portance of having a good recov­ery plan and before the disaster starts, implementing it,” Wallis said. “At the start of the disaster, there were so many things that we had never dealt with that we didn’t even know where to start.” 

The Tubbs Fire burned more than 36,000 acres throughout Sonoma County and roughly 100,000 people had to evacuate their homes — a massive effort the county wasn’t equipped to handle at the time, Wallis said. The Red Cross had been de­ployed to Napa County, where the fire started, leaving Sonoma County officials scrambling to house its residents. 

“We’d become so reliant on the American Red Cross that we just didn’t have the capability to take care of ourselves,” Wallis said. “It was an awful situation. We had elderly people sleeping on gym mats, and whatever we could get on short notice. We had no shelter staff. We were basically grabbing whoever we could and getting them down there, and of course, they were completely untrained and un­prepared for that.” 

As a result, Sonoma County created its own shelter capaci­ty for future disasters. All of the cities and unincorporated areas within the county have the ca­pacity to house 1% of its popula­tion and have the ability to take care of them independently for 24 hours. 

In the event of an evacuation, all cities now have a stockpile of material, and the county has more than 6,000 cots — a large percentage of which are de­signed to accommodate the elderly and people with disabil­ities. The county also increases staff when fire weather is pre­dicted, creating task forces and implementing overtime pay, so that a spot fire can be prevented from expanding when it pops up.

To streamline the rebuilding and assistance process for evac­uees after a disaster, Sonoma County created a system that compiles an individual’s data, so they’re not forced to continually fill out the same information. 

“We want to be able to make sure that we’re taking care of ev­erybody,” Wallis said. “So, once you’re in that system, if when you show up, for instance, at the local assistance center, when the evacuation is over and you’re re­building, you already have all the data that you need to do in there, and they just look you up and say, ‘Oh, OK, yeah you showed up at the evacuation center and you’re ready to go,’ and it ties into other services we have.” 

People often refuse to evac­uate their homes because they don’t want to leave behind their pets, so Sonoma County changed its shelter policy during a disaster, so that pets are now allowed. 

In the early hours of the fire, Wallis said that, as director of emergency management, he didn’t know where the fire was, because firefighters and law en­forcement were busy banging on people’s doors and getting peo­ple out of burning buildings in­stead of calling and saying, “This is exactly where the fire is.” Now, there are 36 fire cameras set up throughout the county that use artificial intelligence to detect early signs of fire and there are organizational structures set up so that emergency management officials can all quickly get on a conference call to share infor­mation. 

“The first time I knew where the fire was is when it showed up at the emergency operations center,” Wallis said. “This was a bad situation. We just did not have robust systems for keeping track of that … Now, whenever a small fire breaks out, we know almost immediately where that fire is.”