 Good afternoon. My name is Paul Onthal. I'm the Assistant Fire Marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department. I've also had the unique opportunity to be in the Debris Task Force Leader for the City of Santa Rosa for the last seven months. As a member of the Fire Department and as an employee of the City of Santa Rosa it's quite a monumental moment to be here seven months later and there's a lot of good work that's been done. Behind me are the speakers. You have on your press packets the lists and names of the speakers. We'll go through each one of them individually. Following the final speaker I'll come back up and open up the question answers period. Without any further delays we'll get started. Good morning everybody. I'm Chris Corsi, the Mayor of Santa Rosa. We're here today to mark a milestone which is the close to being complete on a debris cleanup of this disaster that came upon Santa Rosa and Sonoma County seven months and one day ago. The debris cleanup has been unprecedented in the history of California. More than two million tons of debris has been carted away from the aftermath of the fire. If my math is correct that's four billion pounds of debris. There are lots of numbers to think about here but as we talk about and think about the numbers I urge us all to remember that this isn't just about numbers. It's not just about debris. This represents people's lives and people's memories. A lot of people lost everything they had on the night of October 8th. More than 40 people lost their lives that night. These numbers also indicate an important milestone that we are fully into recovery mode at this point. In Santa Rosa we have 117 homes under construction. Rebuilds of homes burned by the fires. We have 85 more that have their permits and 163 that are in the process of getting their permits. These numbers represent less than 10% of the 3,000 homes that were lost in Santa Rosa. So we're in the beginning but we are solidly in the beginning of recovery and each new permit represents hope and faith on the part of the people who are rebuilding and I hope it gives hope and faith to others who are in that process. I want to thank our partners who are here today. Folks from Sonoma County, California Office of Emergency Services, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the United States Environmental Protection Agency. I also want to thank all of the contractors who've worked so hard on this effort and all of our residents, both those who have lost their homes and those who haven't who have been with us in supporting this effort for the last seven months. This job is not fully complete. No job this big with this many moving parts is going to be perfect and without problems. We know that there are issues out there with some some residents who have not had their property cleaned as they had expected. And we're we know that we're not going to be able to make everyone happy. What we want to do is get as close to that perfection as we can as we possibly can. And that's the pledge that I will give today from myself and the organization that that I represent the City of Santa Rosa that we're going to work as hard as we can till we get as close to perfection as we can on this debris cleanup. With that, I'll introduce Supervisor Shirley Zane of the County of Sonoma. Thank you, Mayor. I am Shirley Zane. I represent the third district on the Board of Supervisors and last year I was the chair of the board during the fires. You know, I want to start off by saying that disasters begin and end at the local level. We've been here all along with our residents and we're going to continue to be there with them. There's a still a very long road ahead. We want to celebrate what we've been able to achieve but we also want to assure the people that we serve that we will continue to advocate for them that we will be there for them. We had a town hall meeting the other night with the county in the city and we had about 160 residents who showed up and they out of listening to all the speakers when we got to the therapist who talked about the crisis counseling program that we were rolling out at the county a three million dollar FEMA funded program that will be funded through December. A lot of the people resonated with that the most because the therapist said are you drinking water? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? And most importantly, are you getting the support you need? Are you talking to your neighbors? She stressed the importance of not being isolated. And so when we come here together to do basically a press conference, we're also talking about standing shoulder to shoulder with all of our different resources. And on behalf of the county of Sonoma, I want to thank the city of Santa Rosa. I want to thank Cal OES. I want to thank the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their contractors, our incredible representatives back in Washington, Congressman Huffman and Congressman Thompson, who are working tirelessly to bring us back the millions, billions of dollars we need to rebuild our community. We do have a long road ahead of us, but we have completed major, major advances in the debris removal. Sonoma County has worked tirelessly to reach this goal. We've had over 40 community meetings in four weeks following the fires, and we continued with our partners. We hosted a Rite of Entry Processing Center. I would be remiss not to mention our environmental health staff that processed literally over 3,000 applications for the government-run debris program. The county also participated in a joint debris task force, which has been instrumental in determining the process of debris removal. It's been a complex process. There have been a lot of players, but we've come together and we aren't done yet. That's the main thing. We aren't done yet. Everybody that stands here before you today has massive empathy over what our residents are experiencing, not just now, not seven months ago, but what they will be experiencing for the next seven years. We embrace them, we are here for them, and I promise you, we can't do enough for them. So even though we're talking about debris removal, it is, as the mayor said, about rebuilding people's lives. We've given many of them a clean slate in terms of those properties and those foundations upon which they can build, and not only build new structures of which will house them and their families, but rebuild memories, the type of memories that we all need as we move forward as a community. Thank you very much, and I'd like to introduce now the incredible director of the Operations of Emergency Services for the governor, Director Mark Ghirladucci, and we can't thank him enough for all he's done. Thank you, Supervisor Zane, and good morning. I'm Mark Ghirladucci, Governor Brown's Director of Emergency Services. I think I want to start off by saying that from the beginning of this very catastrophic, very devastating event, the response has been a one team, one fight effort. That's local, state, federal, private sector, the business community, and mostly the community, the citizens of all the counties that have been impacted by the fire coming together in the response to this event. And that's carried through the recovery. A whole of community approach through the response and into the recovery. And we're continuing to work that today. This is a marathon, not a sprint, but you all may remember just roughly seven months ago in town hall meetings where I stated that we were going to aggressively pursue a debris cleanup operation. And what was the largest debris operation since the 1906 earthquake that California has had to deal with. And really one of the most complicated debris operations that we've seen in our country. And the challenge was getting it done very, very fast in a time frame that we could accelerate the recovery process to move forward. That took a tremendous amount of coordination. And we could not have done that alone. This had to be a whole of community approach. I can't say enough about the local governments, our federal partners, the state agencies and the citizens who endured trucks and heavy equipment and noise and a disruption in the in the in the time frame that that they were dealing with the outcomes of the disaster. We are now close to 99% complete of major operations. But we know that there are still properties that need to be addressed as a handful of properties. We're not going anywhere. We'll continue to work those properties, those those sites, and we'll continue to stay engaged until it's done in an appropriate manner. And we'll take into account all of the issues that are applicable that we can address with our partners at the federal government to make sure that it's done in the best way possible. This is a tremendous effort. And moving forward, after the debris has been cleaned up, we're going to still continue to remain here through the process of helping our communities rebuild, making sure that every federal dollar that's available, making sure that state programs and dollars that are available, making sure that we leverage non governmental organization and community based organizations to come together to ensure that our communities get rebuilt to the fullest. This is very important that you know this because this is a one team one fight effort, and we'll continue to be as we move forward. I can't say enough about the city of Santa Rosa, Santa Sonoma County, Mendocino County, Lake County, Napa County, and all the communities that we work with through this process. And, and I'm really happy that we were able to meet the metric. At least 99% of getting the debris cleaned up in early 2018. So with that now, I'm going to turn it over to my partner, a great partner, federal coordinating officer Bill Roach from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA has been at the hip with us right from the get go. And I can't thank them enough for their continued support to all of us here in this in this disaster. So Bill Roach. Good morning, everybody. And thank you, Mark. My name is Bill Roach. I'm the federal coordinating officer on this event out of Region nine. Our officers are in Oakland. I want to reiterate some of the points that my partner at the state said for one, we have an incredible, really an incredible working relationship with the state of California that has benefited us at all levels. And without that, we wouldn't be getting done what we've gotten done thus far. And there's so so much more left to do. To Mark's point, the federal government's here to help coordinate solutions, recovery solutions at the state and local level. I can't say enough about the local level and the relationships that we've built, both at the state and federal level with the locals to get solutions. Early on, you know, task forces were set up at the local level for both debris and housing that gave us ideas at the federal and state level so we could come to some solutions on on housing folks that had been devastated and didn't have places to go both through the early on process of housing and then the interim housing piece and then ultimately to getting them to to rebuild or do whatever they choose to do in the recovery. We know emphatically that people are still hurting. We're hurting right along with you. I've got staff in my own Oakland office that that were directly impacted because they live in this area as well. So this is to Mark's point, one team, one fight, it all started with debris. It doesn't end with debris. I think we've done a tremendous job collectively to get ourselves to this point. Still got work to do. We all know that and we're not going away, both on the debris issues, nor on the long longer term recovery impacts that we have to address, whether that be housing or any of the other things. The debris mission was a very complex and difficult mission to take on 2.2 billion tons of debris, hazardous debris that have been removed. And with with the help of US EPA, Cal Recycle, USACE and all the other state agencies and federal agencies, I think we've done gotten us to a very good point now so we can start focusing on helping in other areas. I would like to just say that on the be remiss SBA also provided over 1200 loans for the somewhere in the amount of $155 million to help survivors make decisions to rebuild. So still, finally, I want to thank everybody behind me, all the agencies involved others that that aren't here. And of course, all the way down to the local level. Now I want to hand it off to Colonel Eric McFadden, the commander of the Southern Pacific Division for the Corps of Engineers that has been a monumental partner here with us in in driving and managing the debris operations. So thank you. Good morning, everybody. First of all, it's my honor to be speaking here in front of you, provide you an update and wrapping up this very important work. And it's just to reiterate the fact that you've heard throughout the morning, we're not done yet. First, I do want to echo on behalf of our entire US Army Corps of Engineer heartfelt sympathy for the victims and survivors of the October wildfires. Since the onset of admission, I've personally visited many of the impact areas and spoken with with those who lost so much in this fire ravaged region. And I cannot fathom the impact of this natural disaster had on victims and families. But I can assure you that our team here today are very proud to play an important part with the recovery effort and the reconstruction effort that's currently ongoing. Our role here has been one to support supporting our local state and federal partners, removing eligible fire debris so the people living here can begin the task of rebuilding their homes and communities. As a lead agency for the emergency support function three, FEMA called upon the US Army Corps of Engineers in October to execute a massive debris removal operation. This program in partnership with the California Governor Office of Emergency Services, and we've been working tirelessly ever since accomplished this mission as quickly as safely as possible while taking great care to minimize the environmental concerns and dealing with the contaminated material and show our deepest respect for the property owners throughout the process. Like many of our soldiers and civilian employees, I've been deployed around the world. What makes us deployment for our team so important is that the mission that we've had distinct privilege of deploying to help the people living here in Northern California. And in fact, many of our personnel that work in San Francisco area in Sacramento area are from this area and some did lose their houses. And it was their honor to be part of the mission. And it's our honor to be part of the community that helped rebuild this. Today, we've had more than 850 volunteers from across the Army Corps of Engineers deployed in this region. And many of these people have been away from their families and friends for several months. And I assure you they wouldn't be here if they didn't care deeply about this effort that's ongoing. This mission truly took a union of effort, working together to tackle the largest debris removal mission in California since 1906. The success this joint endeavor is evident as we continue to see restoration efforts underway. To highlight some of that, we are at 99% complete as of today, having removed 2.2 million tons of debris, which equates to nearly 314 square miles of fire area that's been cleared. 4272 of the parcels have been cleared, tested and we've notified the county that they're ready for rebuilding. However, I do want to reiterate there's still work to be done. And there's still work that's ongoing, including closing out issues and concerns that have been raised by property owners through our debris removal information line and the financial administrative actions necessary to provide parcel completion reports for every property to FEMA and to close out the contracts. I do want to conclude this by saying I've been in the army for a long time. And I don't recall the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ever being tasked with a debris removal mission of this size and scope. For the Corps and our partners, some of the efforts we undertook to complete these complex tasks, we were truly in uncharted waters and we're innovating as we go, in some cases on a daily basis, to figure out the right solution for the right problem at the right time to rapidly reconstruct and move on to assist the survivors moving forward. I assure you that our team here today and our team that's been here on this entire mission truly takes great pride in having the opportunity to have served the people of Northern California as they recover from such an enormous widespread disaster. And in closing, I want to reiterate, it truly takes a community to rebuild the community. And we're honored to have been part of this community. I want to thank everyone here and everyone within these communities for allowing us to do that. It's my pleasure now to introduce the director of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Enrique Manzanilla from Region 9 Superfund Division. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Again, my name is Enrique Manzanilla. I'm the director of the Superfund Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and our office in San Francisco. I really appreciate the invitation to be here with you today. You know, at the height of this response, EPA was able to gather almost 300 EPA staff and contractors to respond and to work with all our partners here gathered here today. Two individuals are here with me that were part of that group, Michelle Woodtrick from our press office, who I think many of you got to know during the course of this response. And Steve Kalanog, who is my incident commander, doing basically 80% of the timeframe of our involvement in this major, major response for us. You know, we got boots on the ground in mid-October and we began the process of removing household hazardous waste from focus first on NAP and Sonoma counties and then expanded to Lake and Mendocino counties. We surveyed thousands of burdened parcels to locate and ensure the safe removal and disposal of household hazardous waste, paint solvents, pesticides, propane tanks, other types of hazardous materials. We completed 95% of our assigned mission within the first month of being on the ground. After that first month, we began to work to assess and remove asbestos from burn buildings in those four counties and this assessment excavation disposal work was just completed last month. So in terms of numbers, we collected household hazardous waste from over 6,500 parcels and we collected asbestos containing material from over 700 parcels. In total, we collected over 2,600 tons of household hazardous waste and almost 25,000 cubic yards of asbestos containing material. You know, we've done this in other wildfires in prior years but the scale of this was unprecedented for us as an agency and of course we wouldn't have been able to do the work we've done without a tremendous effort on the part of many individuals of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not just folks at US EPA's office in Region 9. You should know that there are people here from our Denver office, our Seattle office, our Dallas office, many individuals and but of course the collaboration of all the people gathered here today and others like our friends that are colleagues at Cal EPA and that lastly I just want to like others have done to acknowledge the residents of the of these communities. You know, we did a lot of good work. The work still continues, obviously, and I want to acknowledge that these residents suffered a tremendous devastating loss but I have and my colleagues at EPA have a high degree of respect for their resilience. So again, I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes our speakers. I would now like to open for question and answer period. Today's conference is really an update to provide you an understanding of kind of where we're at and really today is a description that major operations are complete and we're focusing on the remaining a few items that still remain. So really it was more of giving you a complete assessment of where we're at and what is still yet to be done. And you know with the with the change in tempo and the change in the major operations are now complete, we didn't want people to say, hey, you know, we've seen less trucks, less activity, and think that things were going away. We wanted to make sure that everybody was up to speed on where we're at but knowing that we're going to continue to stay until everything gets complete. We're pretty close. We're hoping to have everything done by the end of May. May 30th, right? Yeah. So just to reiterate the number, 314 square miles of debris have been removed and that's a math problem based on the total number of properties that were removed. The debris has gone to multiple landfills across the four counties, seven to be exact. So right now, based on the contracts that have been let, both at the federal and state level, we're somewhere just on the debris, plus or minus 1.3 billion. Well, it's hard to put a price tag per parcel. It's so expensive, largely because of the materials that are being taken away, right? Heavily, mercury, asbestos has to be, as they say, burrito wrapped. I'm not an expert on the hazardous and what has to get done to it. Challenges, obviously in distance, because landfills, the farther you have to truck it, the more costly it is. And those types of things is why it's so much higher than you would see on a hurricane event that has simply largely vegetative debris that can be, you know, chopped and mulched and therefore not hauled off. Also, lots of tonnage, concrete and those types of things add cost to it as well. Yeah, I'm sure there has. I would imagine that 9-11 was a higher price tag. Yeah, how about, no, I'm not off the top of my head. I don't have those figures in front of me. Just to address your remaining one percent of properties, complex properties. So there are some properties where the bridges have been burnt out and so part of the effort to gain access to those parcels means the construction of a temporary bridging asset to come in and then be able to remove the debris. So very, very small numbers, final debris removal in some of those locations. So currently we have roughly a hundred people involved in the mission and just to kind of highlight volunteers from the, across the Army Corps of Engineers, we don't have a standing cadre of individuals that deploy regularly to disaster areas. Everybody has a job that they continue to do, whether it's a project manager or they work construction efforts, civil works, military construction, navigation and operations. A wide variety of different people have volunteered for this mission. I can answer that. The county owns the landfill and it's run through an agreement by Republic Services. Republic Services had expanded the landfill with a cell shortly, I think, two weeks before the fires. And about 60 percent of the material I understand from them was diverted. So in terms of the debris, it was only about 40 percent. We still have, I talked to the director of the landfill from Republic Services two nights ago and he said that we have 29 years of airspace still left that landfill, 29 years. So just to halt that myth. I don't, but I think as the, as the Colonel already said, it went to several other landfills but ours was the main one. The 29 years is about the best, I think, we can hopeful with the landfill. I heard it was about five percent, but because they had expanded the cell and had just put the cell in literally two weeks before the fires, we had a lot of airspace and we still do. And the other thing too is, thanks to the Army Corps of Engineers and their contractors, they diverted the majority of that material, which is what it should be. We do not want to put material that can be reused in a landfill. So currently right now part of what the debris task force tracks is that portion. So the county right now is in conversations as to what that will look like and what the model will look like and able to properly facilitate the essentially the billing portion of it. But part of the right of entry process involved actually providing some of your insurance documents to the right of entry process. And so those debris portions that are eligible for debris is what will be used to to seek the recovery. But there could be other uses that the homeowner could use that debris removal for if there's anything else left on the property that wasn't necessarily eligible through the program. So all that will be taken into account of what's being looked at to make sure that residents insurance pays for what's owed and doesn't take anything away from them that they would need for their own debris removal. So yes we've certainly learned some lessons you know on this one the the Cours contract the the ACI contract that's a pre-bid contract and it's nationwide in three different areas has all kinds of labor rates and those types of things in there they the existing contract that they had to deal with nothing in there for fire components. So we had to write that's why there were some difficulties in the contracting process because we had to go back and negotiate pricing on this type of complex fire removal as best as metals and all those things. And so we we've had an action after action on the federal side with the core all the way up to headquarters to and they're re-competing their their contracts this coming year and that fire component everything we've learned here is going to be in that new contract so the lesson was learned unfortunately it caused some heart aches and delays but there was measures taken largely on the state side to to solve for that along with us so we wouldn't have any stoppage of work so while it was a issue it was never an issue in getting work done so it didn't delay getting work done. I can answer that coming from the public assistance side of the house in my future my previous life so we're continuing to work with not only Santa Rosa but all the applicants that have public infrastructure damage specific to the Santa Rosa water we're waiting to get some sampling reports on the levels of benzene and then we're going to work with them on the scope of work and the federal dollars and state dollars that will be will accompany that work so they can repair restore that that that facility or that function. So the public assistance program is certainly one that is is going to be you know probably we'll be here just doing some grants over the next 30, 60, 90 days working with the community's local state levels to make sure we get those grants and the funding in place so they can continue with the recovery. What we're doing is there are some sites that were over scraped and so we're going through and with our the federal partners in the local governments and evaluating if that was in fact the case and if it was then we're bringing in we have a different contract that's coming in and placing a a fill base back in there to get it to a place where it's ready to be move forward in the rebuild. So really that's been through the assessment a handful of properties but it's across all the different counties that we're looking at just to make sure that we are addressing the commitments that we made and look this is not a surgical procedure okay there's nothing finite about this this is a massive very broad scale debris cleanup and sometimes you're going to do a little over scraping sometimes you're going to get a little damage but you know when you think about the the the size scope and complexity of this the amount of debris is removed it really ended up with just a handful of we'll continue to work with the the resident and the community to address all of those the Cal Recycle programs in the north that's Cal Recycle is the state agency that we typically use for debris or response and debris cleanup on events that don't typically go to a federal disaster for the most part and they had the the north butte and Yuba and and Plass or some of these northern California counties they were able to move forward there was of course we're smaller operational scopes they do that all the time they do a great job and they use their contractors to facilitate those those have been completed long ago it was important for us to get them to complete those so that we would free them up in the event that we had something else break in the state we in fact did have something else break in the state we had Ventura County the Thomas fire resulted in over thousand structures in Ventura County and then in in Santa Barbara and we were able to re-divert those CalRecycle resources down there and begin their operation and and that operation is also close to about I would say 95 percent 96 percent complete again all in this time frame very compressed statewide what we would consider three catastrophic events the Thomas fire in Ventura the Santa Barbara mudslides and the fires of north balancing all three of these with all these resources to meet metrics that were really unprecedented set of metrics uh get those done while still taking into account all the impacts to the community you're welcome I'll take one last question if there is one seen none thank you everybody for coming and we appreciate it