[EAS] Wildfires -- Colorado re-learning the lessons California learned

[tom king]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2022 at 1:52 AM Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com> wrote:

>Policies change.

>NWS does issue "red flag warnings" about fire weather conditions. It
>operates satellites to detect new wildfires. During briefings NWS is often
>one of the "first notifiers" about wildfires until another agency takes
>over incident commmand.

Our NWS (Oxnard CA) does issue Red Flag Warnings... 

>A better question might be, which agency *IS RESPONSIBLE* for issuing
>public wildfire warnings.  You'll discover a lot of averted eyes and
>"not me" responses.  Or you'll hear the mantra, "all disasters are local."
>But those local agencies almost never have the funding, training or
>authority. The local agencies almost never have anyone at the meeting
>where everyone else decides its the local's job.

Our county has had enough Fire (Santa Barbara County) that starts in the mountains and roars down the mountainsides
into densely populated areas that they are getting better with issuing pre-evacuation and evacuation orders  Mostly over WEA
but sometimes over EAS as well (our county is split in 2 by a 4000' mountain range) 

They *did* learn that issuing nebulous warnings about "Flood Imminent! Get to higher ground" without any geo-location caused
nothing but an "flood" of 911 calls as residents tried to figure out where it was for(That was for below Burn Area from the Thomas Fire)

Unfortunately I'm on my 4th set of Emergency Managers here and each one needs to re-learn the lessons that the others already learned.

Tom King
LECC Chair
Santa Barbara County Ca