 All right, good afternoon. My name is Paul Lowenthal, Assistant Fire Marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department. I'm here to open up the press conference. Today we'll be discussing the compromise infrastructure directly around our storm drain system and storm water up in the Fountain Grove area. Obviously following the rains and the firesome concerns have been raised. With that we hope to address those concerns and then also have a number of subject matter experts that are here to address any requests or concerns. Opening the press conference will be the Mayor, Chris Corsi. Following Chris Corsi will be our Director of the Water Department, Mr. Hornstein, and then following Mr. Hornstein will be Deputy Fire Chief Bill Shubin with the Santa Rosa Fire Department. Good afternoon. I'm Chris Corsi, Mayor of Santa Rosa. As Paul said, we're going to give you an update on our ongoing assessment of the storm drain system and our staff will be sharing with you what the findings are thus far. So we're looking at out of an abundance of caution, providing information on how rain, the coming rain, could potentially impact neighborhoods affected by the wildfires, particularly the Haley Fountain Grove neighborhood. Our residents have been through a lot this month and I know the last thing they want to hear is that they there may be potential new risks in their neighborhoods. So we're providing this information as a safety precaution to ensure everyone is informed. There are a lot of crews in and around areas where homes are still standing right now. We want residents to understand what's going on when they see workers present in their neighborhoods. The city, the county, and our state partners and federal partners are rapidly completing a thorough assessment of the storm drain system in the burned areas to determine what actions are needed to address any risks. We sincerely hope that there will not be any need to ask residents to leave the area. However, we want our residents to be prepared and alert as this situation unfolds. We'll continue to update you through our website SonomaCountyRecovers.org, through social media, and we'll use our alerting tools if needed. And now we're going to hear from our director of the Water Utility, Ben Hornstein. The the city is actively assessing and taking mitigating actions in regards to an emerging situation from fire damage to our stormwater infrastructure in the Fountain Grove area. As part of our fire recovery activities, city staff went into the field following the fire to assess the state of our infrastructure in the burned areas and observed some possible burned stormwater pipes. As we investigated further, we identified in some of the areas specifically where we have plastic pipes made of high-density polyethylene storm drain pipes. The pipes caught fire and in some cases were destroyed for significant lengths up to a few hundred feet. This resulted in underground voids or cavities where the pipe had been and creates a potential for sinkholes and result in landslides and flooding concerns. So far we've identified eight sites where the pipe has been lost and 20 additional suspect areas that are under investigation today. In one area we had an active sinkhole repair and we began emergency repairs that are almost completed. In response to this emerging issue, the city has re-instituted our emergency operation center and we're working closely with the county and state officials who are providing support to the response. Over the past few days we've had crews in the field sending TV cameras down the pipes in all the suspect areas to understand the scope of this issue. We've also had teams of engineers and geotechnical experts assessing every site where we've lost storm drain pipes as to the relative risk of slides floods or debris flows. As needed the city is making plans for emergency mitigation measures and repairs to the piping infrastructure. To ensure the safety of the public the city will have crews in the field during the upcoming storm events to monitor the situation with emergency personnel standing by. We will begin the act of monitoring tonight and continue through the storm. We will have similar monitoring during all upcoming storm events until this situation is stabilized. Good afternoon I'm Bill Shubin, Deputy Fire Chief for Santa Rosa Fire Department. The State of Santa Rosa's Emergency Operations Center continues to work with local state and federal partners to work on storm drain risk assessment triage as well as mitigation efforts. I want to emphasize this is a fluid situation. We know the rain is coming we want the residents to be prepared. This morning our staff went door to door in the Fountain Grove area to talk to people about the mitigation efforts underway in the infrastructure assessments that we've done. We were asking residents to especially in the Fountain Grove area to be extra vigilant and to have a plan to leave in the event that it is necessary. If you see evidence of flooding mud or debris flows buckling roads or sinkholes in the area call 911 and avoid that area. For emergency notifications once again we want to urge everybody to sign up for SoCo Alerts. You can do so by visiting socoalert.com. Also Nixle via the Santa Rosa Police Department. You can do that by texting 888-777 to Nixle. And as Mayor Korsky mentioned earlier as more information becomes available please visit our website at SonomaRecoveries.org. Thank you. So as we stated earlier our attention here is to provide that first round of information directly to the public through this press conference. This follows the press release and the door hangers that are going out today. We are now going to open up to questions. We have with us today the National Weather Service, Cal Fires, Incident Management Team that's been assisting with the watershed task force, the Santa Rosa Police Department, Cal OES and our city's Storm and Creek Division. Hi I'm Hevin Moore with the Stormwater and Creeks team. So the active sinkhole was at the end of Newbury Court and that was let's say about 300 feet, 250 feet of pipe that was destroyed. The sinkhole itself opened up about midway about four feet in diameter and about seven or so feet deep. That is almost fully resolved. We use emergency contracting work to go on site, collapse that entire disintegrated pipe breach and to replace that pipe that should be completed by the end of the day. So that was two days ago that it was identified by field crews and work was started within one day of it being found. That is correct and we have evacuation plans with the Santa Rosa Police Department to help us out as well as fire assets out there to do that. It's going to be very isolated to small small geographical areas. It will not be the entire founding room area at one time. How many homes could be in the harm's way if there was flooding? Right now we have different sections, six different sections throughout the city mainly in Fountain Grove that we're looking at and it varies from a couple hundred residents up to actually from like 78 residents up to a couple hundred residents in each zone. So each one of the sites is unique because it depends on the length of pipe that was made out of plastic and the amount of risk that each one poses can vary tremendously. We could have a very short piece of pipe in a very flat area where we just need to make sure no one is directly on top of five feet. We could have other areas where it's a much longer reach of pipe. So we're in the process of identifying that and getting it cameraed so that we have a full understanding of the scope of each of those locations. There's a number of ways that they've been identified. So immediately following the fire initial evaluations were done to look for melted or look at our outfall structure. A few of them were identified that way and then with further field investigation from the engineering teams and now the CCTV which is the closed circuit television which is actually run through the pipe. That's how we're identifying and confirming the status. We're also doing visual observations of evidence of burn from the surface. That's an initial look to help us identify sites for further investigation. At this point though we're doing a systematic CCTV of the entire system. So as I understand it that at the end point of the pipe where it rained out is an effort. So that's where the fire started melting the pipe and it just might bring you all the way in. That is one scenario that we have identified in the field. The other way that that could happen is the reverse. If a home site burned and they had a plastic pipe adjacent to their property that pipe could catch and travel the opposite way as well. Which is why we're looking at both public and private pipes to in order to identify risks. At this point in time we have not discovered that but we are still in the evaluation process to determine the full extent of impact. So we've found some of them go from most of the ones we've found to at this point are the small sections that come in behind the public system. So from a property edge of a property so if you think about where you're in your backyard you all probably have a drain where your rainwater goes. So from that drain till it connects to the roadway there have been a few sites where where they're crossing under access roads that belong to the city. Again it varies. They can be any size that they were originally installed at. So of to date we've identified as small as 15 or 18 inches in diameter and as large as 36 inches in diameter. Cost not to not at this point we're still in the analysis and identification. Yes that's correct. So the reason why we're seeing this in Fountain Grove primarily is that HDPE pipe the plastic pipe wasn't used until about 20 years ago. The coffee park area is older and also the risk if there was a pipe there is much less because it's flat and the pipes are much shallower. In Fountain Grove because of the terrain there's more risk if we have a collapsed or an absent pipe and there's also deeper structures because of the hill sites. We're going to have the National Weather Service talk about what we're expecting with this coming storm. Okay my name is Jim Wallman. I've been asked to come here to keep an eye on these storms that are coming up this week. As far as the storm that's coming in tonight and tomorrow it's going to start tonight. It's some lighter showers. There will be some locally heavier ones but really the bulk the main impact from the storm we're expecting is going to be from about mid-morning tomorrow say about nine until early afternoon about 2 p.m. That's when we expect the heaviest rains to occur and then tapering off the showers. Throughout the whole event we're probably expecting about a quarter to a half inch of rain in the valleys and once you get up in the hills you could see as much as one inch of rainfall occur with this storm. Winds with this storm are not going to be all that strong. 10 to 15 gusts to 25 miles an hour so we are going to get a break on Tuesday but there's another storm potentially a little bit wetter coming in for Wednesday and Wednesday night. Preliminary amounts with that storm could be about 50 percent higher so we'd be looking maybe about a third to three quarters of an inch of rain in the valleys and maybe as much as an inch and a half in the hills. And the peak period for rainfall with that one would appear at probably Wednesday afternoon into Wednesday evening. Beyond that there is potential for more storms to arrive possibly again next Sunday and to early next week. The strength on that storm though if it does arrive is really uncertain but it's something we're definitely going to keep an eye on. It definitely looks active probably for the rest of at least November before we get a more prolonged break. Yes. Once we get past the assessment and the mitigation of the urgent activities we'll be repairing all of these damaged and failed pipes. There was rain a couple nights ago. Is there any impact from that? We didn't see significant flooding. That rain may have contributed to the one sinkhole exposing itself and helped us understand the nature of this issue. We do currently we have 10 strike teams with closed circuit tv cameras those are the cameras that run into the entire length of the pipe assessing the suspect areas that have not yet been confirmed one way or another and we also have six teams of engineers and geologists that are assessing each confirmed site as to the relative risk of sinkholes floods in slides based on the terrain and other factors. Yes absolutely we can share that and we also have a map here we can review with you that points out the known sites as well. We will have a map very shortly online with all of the sites identified. So just to follow up on that part of what we're doing is to make sure that we're providing that outreach to our community. So your question about the maps is a step that we want to take. We want to make sure that our community is informed on what's happening and the measures that we're taking. So we will have that map available online at Sonoma County River Governors dot org. But as they were saying this is developing pretty quickly but we're doing everything we can with all of our city's county and local partners up to state level to make sure we're addressing it as quickly as possible as they continue to be identified and we work to mitigate them. So we'll have these people available for questions. If anybody wants to come up otherwise at this point in time we'll terminate the press conference and if anything else comes up or requires any additional outreach we'll be sure to get you guys involved as quickly as possible. Thank you.