Marin County’s state senator has authored a bill, SB 833, that would require every county in California to adopt the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system.
“The size and scope of wildland fire events in California are only getting worse,” said Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, in a statement. “It’s clear there are significant shortcomings in our emergency alert system, and residents deserve timely notifications and up-to-date information.”
McGuire said the way the bill is written would require some counties to purchase the WEA software. He said Lake County’s annual bill for WEA, for instance, ranges from $2,500 to $5,000.
McGuire, whose district includes Marin and the northern coastal counties, says that in the October 2017 firestorm, thousands of residents in the path of the fires received no emergency alerts. The fires leveled more than 6,000 homes, burned more than 170,000 acres, caused billions of dollars in damage and resulted in the deaths of 40 people.
The WEA system, a partnership between the Federal Communications Commission and all the major U.S. wireless carriers, broadcasts from cellular towers in the designated alert area to any WEA-enabled mobile device. Customers of participating wireless carriers with WEA-capable phones can opt out.
Not all cellphones on the market are capable of receiving WEA alerts, but it is anticipated that most commercially available phones will be WEA-capable in the near future.
In addition to requiring every county to adopt the WEA system, McGuire’s bill would require every county to have operators trained to implement an evacuation order using WEA. It would establish standards for when counties should use the system, require annual training for emergency managers, and require that alerts be sent out via landline telephones and mobile phones along with other communication mediums including radio, television and electronic highway billboards.
“It will be very similar to AMBER alerts,” McGuire said.
McGuire said Sonoma County had access to the WEA system during the North Bay fires but it was never used because an emergency services employee wasn’t adequately trained in how to deploy it. He said mandating that WEA broadcast over a wide range of media is vital since during the North Bay fire thousands of cellphone towers were knocked out, as well as Internet and cable service. In some communities, the only medium by which people were receiving information was radio.
(CIOs and other IT leaders from California’s counties gathered this week for a conference, and their “lessons learned” after catastrophic emergencies such as fires and earthquakes was a key topic. Techwire will have a full report Thursday on that discussion.)
Chris Reilly, emergency services manager in the Marin County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services, said WEA is just one of several systems Marin County already has in place to notify residents in case of a wildfire, flood or other emergency.
“With the multitude of systems that we have, I think we’re ahead of the curve in terms of our ability to send out notifications,” Reilly said.
In addition to WEA, Marin County has a system known as “Alert Marin,” which can send alerts to cellphones, or Voice over Internet Protocol phones, by call, text, email or smartphone application.
On Tuesday, the state Senate’s Governmental Organization Committee passed McGuire’s bill on a 12-0 vote to the Senate’s Appropriations Committee.
But Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle, who heads the California State Sheriffs Association’s legislative committee, said both his association and the California Emergency Services Association would like to see some changes in the bill.
“Where the rub comes is it is a state-mandated program that is unfunded, and one size doesn’t fit all,” Doyle said. “My association is working with him to see if we can get some modifications.”
McGuire said the bill might be amended.
©2018 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
