San Diego County Releases New Fire Season Disaster Plan For Residents
Speaker 1: 00:00 During times of high fire danger. For example, this week in San Diego we are told to be prepared to evacuate or be without power or other services for a couple of days, but exactly how do you prepare? Last week the County office of emergency services announced it was mailing out disaster prep folders to 200,000 residents and 5,000 businesses and areas considered to be at the highest risk for wildfire. But the personal disaster plans don't just cover fire. They include preparations for earthquakes, floods and other cataclysms. Joining me to talk about the new personal disaster plans is director of the San Diego County office of emergency services, Holly Porter and Holly, welcome to the program. Thank you. Happy to be here. Now fires sup near Pacific Palisades and in San Bernardino are is still burning. We've seen brush fires here in Alpine and Talmage in recent days, so we are in the pocket of wildfire season now. Holly, what do we know about how prepared San Diegans are right now for a wildfire? Speaker 2: 01:06 We did a survey a couple of years ago and found that 38% of San Diego County residents reported having previously completed a family disaster plan. And about 50% of people said they were ready to evacuate their home in less than 15 minutes. And that's important because when you have, you know, these, these tropical storm force or even hurricane force winds that are fueling flames, it's very often that first responders will have less than 15 minutes to get an alert and warning out, uh, let alone the time it would take you to evacuate. So it's important for people to think now about what they would take with them if they had to very quickly leave their home. And this isn't just people in the rural part of the unincorporated County, you know, we've seen lots of fires and canyons recently that have resulted in evacuations. And we saw, uh, back in 2003, this Friday is actually the anniversary of the devastating 2003 fires. And during that time, the Cedar fire burned 80,000 acres and 10 hours. That's over two acres per second. And so you can see these fires move very quickly. So it's important that people are prepared. Speaker 1: 02:23 Give us some overall idea of what is in these disaster plans about wildfire. Speaker 2: 02:29 Well, it talks about things that you can do before or fire to be ready. For example, knowing at least two ways out of a each room in your house or your neighborhood, thinking in advance of what routes you can take. People are creatures of habit and we tend to travel, uh, one way to and from home in school. But it's important to know during disasters that some of those roads may be blocked or impossible. And so knowing multiple ways to a, the locations that you frequent is very keeping important documents in a fireproof container and also copies in your emergency supply kit that's accessible near an exit is a good way to prepare, getting to know your neighbors. Uh, one thing that people find very surprising is that if you add up all of the uniformed fire personnel, law enforcement personnel in San Diego County in totality, along with the emergency medical services personnel, anybody that would come to your aid during a large scale catastrophic event, all of those people put together, make up far less than 1% of our total population. Speaker 2: 03:35 That's why it's important for us to know our neighbors and to know if there's someone next to you who may not be able to self evacuate so that you can assist them and get them out of harm's way and a fast moving fire. Also practicing, evacuating. If you have children and you're at home, it may be very disconcerting to them, uh, when you're in a panic and you have less than 15 minutes to leave. Um, so, so practicing with them and letting them know what the possibilities are in terms of hazards that you may face and how your family will react during those situations. We also urge people, you know, during Santa Ana's, this is not the time to use power tools. If you're pulling your car over to the side of the road, you want to pull over on pavement, not into any kind of plant material that may catch fire. Speaker 2: 04:24 Uh, vehicles, cause lots of fires. Humans are the main cause of fires. So you don't want to throw your cigarette out the window, uh, this week for anytime, but this week in particular, um, or have a chain that's dragging from the back of your truck that can cause a spark that then ignites a fire along a freeway. So all of these are things we want people to pay attention to in San Diego County, particularly this week during a critical fire danger. The, this disaster plan also touches on terminologies used during wildfire that might confuse people. You know, it's important to know what these terms mean because every fire agency in San Diego County, we are very collaborative here. That's one of the advantages that the residents enjoy is that the fire and law enforcement agencies in our community are incredibly, uh, well coordinated. One of the things they do is, is use the same terminology like evacuation warning and evacuation order. When there's time they will issue an evacuation warning and that means get ready to leave. Evacuation order means leave immediately. Um, there's an imminent danger. Knowing what those two terms mean, uh, is very valuable. The, the guide that we have on our website ready San diego.org also includes things like soft road closure compared to a hard road closure. And then other hazards we may face. What's the difference between a tsunami watch and a tsunami advisory? All of these are things are good to know in advance. Now people in high fire areas Speaker 1: 05:58 will begin receiving these personal disaster plans in the mail that the week of October 28th and that strikes me that's pretty late in the fire season. Why did you wait so long to mail these out? Speaker 2: 06:10 We've been working with a designer to um, to put the plan together and we're hoping to get it out a little bit sooner. But um, these are actions that people can take throughout the year to be prepared. It's also available right on our website so anyone can access it in both English and Spanish and we'll, we'll have braille guides available at uh, all of the branch libraries, the 33 branch libraries for the County. But anybody can go online today and access that family disaster plan@reddysandiego.org Speaker 1: 06:42 now in addition to the new disaster plans, how has the office of emergency services gearing up for this week of high fire danger and specifically what new technologies are in place that you didn't have, let's say back in 2003 or 2007 Speaker 2: 06:56 there are lots of new technologies available at our disposal including situational awareness software so that all first responder agencies are using the same meeting place online to exchange information. We have gone leaps and bounds in terms of our ability to alert and warn the public when there is a need to take some sort of protective action. We utilize alert San Diego and we encourage people to register their mobile phones with alert San Diego so that we can reach out when we need people to evacuate. We have all listed and unlisted landline numbers, but most people don't have landline numbers anymore. So we want them to register their mobile phones with that system. And we also are working with now with a community emergency response teams and in the future will be uh, they'll be out, uh, doing preparedness actions. There are about 1300 community emergency response team members throughout the County of San Diego and these are people who are very active in emergency response, but we're in the future hoping to utilize them for preparedness actions to help their neighbors get ready for catastrophic events. In terms of technology, we're just in a very different place than we were in 2003 in that fire. And fortunately there are about 2,800 structures destroyed. We haven't seen anything on that scale really since, since 2007, which was another big event. But we, we just want not only the first responders are really preparing, we want the public to be prepared as well Speaker 1: 08:26 and keeping our fingers crossed. I've been speaking with director of the San Diego County office of emergency services, Holly Porter. Holly. Thank you very much. Thank you. Speaker 2: 08:37 [inaudible] Speaker 3: 08:43 [inaudible].
