After researching the topic of emergency evacuations this year’s Grand Jury, in their annual report released late last week, point out that the sad reality is that “disabled and elderly are most likely to die during a disaster.” They go on to cite that during Hurricane Katrina 16 years ago, nearly half of the dead were 75 or older. After Hurricane Maria struck Peurto Rico in 2017, 77 percent of those who perished were 65 or older.
These statistics and findings serve to underscore the absolute need for not only effective evacuation alerts, warnings and follow-through with orders to residents from law enforcement and emergency crews and partnering agencies, but also the need to shore up communication deficits between emergency managers/law enforcement and the public, among other areas of concern.
One of the salient findings within this portion of the report notes that although information on preparing for wildfires is widely available online and provided in mailers by CalFire, county agencies and nonprofits such as Firewise Communities, individualized evacuation plans created for the disabled and the elderly are far less common. The Grand Jury recommended county government departments serving the elderly and disabled and the senior centers in the county should consider assisting their clients or encourage families and/or caregivers to create these individualized evacuation plans. We concur.
On the whole, communication during emergencies in Lake County appear to be improving and we give the various agencies kudos for accomplishing preparedness despite additional challenges such as the COVID pandemic which hindered or piled on more complications on things such as shelters and TEPs (Temporary Evacuation Points), hopefully as the Grand Jury found, the Sheriff’s employment and customization of the new Zonehaven database will allow essential geographic information during fires and other emergencies and will be available to County administration, emergency managers and residents. There will be glitches as is customary with new technology, but those can be overcome.
We believe another significant finding in the report concerns a lack of a centralized list of at-risk residents. Currently in Lake County, these lists with approximately 7,000 names are available but maintained by at least five different groups. Moreover, the Grand Jury notes that the PG&E Medical Baseline Program list is made available only if an NDA has been provided by the requesting agency. They raised the valid question of whether one single list “could and should be generated, regularly updated, and maintained under proper confidentiality requirements by one single agency.”
Among other recommendations, the Grand Jury report proposes that the Sheriff should consider providing bilingual communications universally to the public during emergencies, the OES Manager should update the AFN Annex of the County’s Emergency Operations Plan from its 2017 edition, and that local law enforcement should investigate how to achieve greater compliance with, and confidence in, future evacuation orders so as to reduce potential injury to both residents and sheriff’s deputies and other first responders. An extensive recap and review of the Hidden Valley Lake evacuation during the LNU fires last year is presented as a situational case study.
We believe the County, EOS and partner agencies can do an ever better job of communicating issues related to emergency preparedness to the public. That could go along way in allaying residents’ fears and concerns and also serve to answer questions regarding the plan for areas of the county which have problems with ingress and egress and evacuation such as Soda Bay where there is one way in and out of the area, how to find out where TEPs are located immediately after evacuations are called for during a fire, and how to reach more seniors and the disabled, segments of the population most susceptible and at risk during these emergencies.
—The Editorial Board, Lake County Record-Bee
