[EAS] The California Fires - Another view

[Bill Ruck]

Warning!  Bill is getting up on his soap box again.

Most cities and towns do a pretty good job of taking care of their 
everyday problems.  But it is the "Hundred Year" event that 
challenges them all.  Nobody can have enough resources at hand to 
effectively handle such an event.  And it takes time for Mutual Aid 
to ramp up and travel to the emergency.

I tend to giggle when someone tells me that he (or she) is in 
"Emergency Management".  One does not manage an emergency; it does a 
really good job of doing what it wants to do.  At best you will be 
managing cleaning up after the emergency.

But IMHO the weak spot across the board is TRAINING.

Fire services do a good job training for their everyday house 
fire.  They show up, size up the fire, direct the response, and put 
out the fire.  Almost all of the time they can save the neighbor's houses.

But wildland fires are totally different and most city firemen are 
not trained for this.  One does not put out a forest fire; you build 
fire lines around it and hopefully "contain" it.  Sooner or later the 
fire runs out of fuel and goes out.

Mixing these two together is a problem.

My experience with First Responders is that they are very dedicated 
to what they do but tend to be "silos" in their specialty and even at 
that resources for training are limited.  The fire service is best at 
this; police tend to skip over training so they can go out and bust perps.

A couple of years ago at the NAB there was a joint EAS / FCC / FEMA 
meeting.  I asked a long question that started with "When I was in 
the Navy we spent a lot of time on drills.  But when something bad 
happens everybody knows what to do."  I then suggested that FEMA 
needs to fund training across the board.  The response was something 
like "Well maybe we should look into that."

Regarding the recent Sonoma and Napa fires, the county First 
Responders went out to solve the immediate problem but quickly 
realized that it was beyond their abilities to contain.  Management 
had to make some hard and quick decisions mostly relying on their 
experience.  In this case, probably no experience.

However, if training was available for them in the whole subject of 
emergency public warnings and emergency public directions they would 
be able to a much better job using the tools available to 
them.  While a better public warning system would not have saved many 
homes in the recent fires, it could have reduced the number of deaths.

YMMV

Bill Ruck
Curmudgeon
San Francisco