LAKE COUNTY— The Lake County Sheriff’s Office hosted a community meeting via both Zoom and Facebook Live Tuesday to provide information on the county’s new tool to help with evacuations in case of an emergency – the digital platform called Zonehaven.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve our response and ability to prepare for inevitable events. Zonehaven is one of many tools that we have available. It’s not designed to replace the other tools that we have in place, like Nixle; or even just going out and knocking on doors and letting people know about the evacuations when they’re in progress,” said Sheriff Brian Martin. “It’s meant to offer another solution and to help us out and make all other systems more effective and more efficient.”
Martin was careful to point out there is no perfect system for emergency preparedness and/or notification. “It’s not the Holy Grail. We haven’t yet found that. We haven’t found the magic dust to make everything perfect and magical but we hope that by offering a variety of solutions we have, we increase everybody’s survivability in our county and increase our ability to deliver services during times of disaster,” said Martin. “Our primary goal is to save lives. We do that by preparing for emergencies, because we know they’re going to happen, and we do that by jumping into action quickly when emergency strikes. We feel that this system will help us in our abilities to improve and deliver services during times of disaster. We’re gonna be able to provide faster information to our first responders on the ground, secondary responders and support personnel.”
The meaning of ‘Know Your Zone’
The founder and CEO of Zonehaven, Charlie Crocker, presented the platform to the public. “In the last year alone, we saw six of the top most destructive wildfires in California history. He added that the lessons from these fires over the last few years has really driven emergency responders’ ability to understand how to plan for training and executing much cleaner and faster evacuations.
“A lot of the planning happens now before the incident, rather than once the incident has happened. It has been a huge change and it allows us to have a much faster reflex time when calling for and communicating an evacuation. Having a single source, one place to go to get that information, it makes it easier for everybody in the community and in the press – to have access to the best information. It’s about reducing the reflex time for calling for an evacuation, having information accessible to you in the community, integrating with existing channels. This is not a replacement for your existing warning systems, but something that helps with those systems. Collecting and organizing that information and making that available for the first responders make the planning and the execution much faster.”
Know your path to safety
In an emergency, local officials will order evacuations using pre-determined zones to keep the families safe.
Website: community.zonehaven.com.
Members of the community that don’t have internet access can call the Lake County Sheriff’s office at (707) 262-4200 to know their zones.
The Lake County Sheriff’s Office community engagement team has put out fliers and videos on their social media sites, and more fliers will be released this week. Throughout the entire summer, during the fire season, information about how to know the zones will be published on both Facebook page and official website –www.lakesheriff.com.
“This program is made possible by a grant that Lake County was included in. If it’s a success, we’d like to see it continue right here in Lake County, and it will only be successful if you in the community know your zone ahead of time. It’s so important and it helps us in our efforts to keep you safe during times of disaster,” said Martin.
