 This is a television show produced down here at the studios of Davis Media Access. My name is Jeff Shaw. I'm the production manager for Davis Media Access as well as the station director for KDRT or Low Power Radio Station. Today, I'd like to welcome as our guest, Dana Carey. She is the emergency manager at the Yolo County Office of Emergency Services. And she's going to be talking to us a little bit about some of the projects that are going on currently at the Office of Emergency Services. So thanks for coming in today. Yeah, my pleasure. I wanted to ask you briefly what your role is there. I know your title is the emergency manager, maybe it's probably something even longer than that. But what has been your role there? What kind of projects do you work on? Strictly this one that we're going to be talking about or sort of all over the map? Emergency management is actually an old time profession from the civil defense era. It's just grown up over time from 9-11 to fire time. So our jobs keep changing. More typically the people that you never see that are in the background behind all the fire law, public works, and EMS professionals just organizing response. Yeah, I imagine there's tons of coordination between all the different agencies that have a stake in what happens with emergencies. And I imagine your job is probably knowing who all the players are and all the different stakes and lots of meetings, I imagine. Lots of meetings, lots of knowing who to call to get things done. So we're talking specifically today a little bit about this, the Yolo County evacuation plan and Yolo Alert, and I wanted to ask you how that came about, or what is this, how did the process of, I guess, the purpose of the plan, and when did it start, I guess, coming up with this plan? So evacuation planning is always a key kind of plan for emergency managers, it's right up there with hazard mitigation plans, things like that. Because we need to keep everybody safe, get everybody out in a timely manner. Our evacuation planning actually kind of kicked up a lot more effect after the Orville Dam incident. Right, right. So we've been working on this for like a year and a half, it just happens to be released right after all these big fires, so it's getting quite a bit of attention, which is good because we want everybody to know about it. Yeah, did you study the Orville Dam evacuation at all, or is that sort of informed all the colleagues around the state, I imagine, as to how important an evacuation plan is? Well, I actually worked for Sutter County for a week up in Orville, so I went out on deployments, I was in their Emergency Operations Center, and what we're doing is zone-based evacuation, which isn't anything that they had necessarily for that event, but it tends to be a best practice in our industry. The zone model, and of course with the Paradise Fire, there's the same sort of evacuation issues as far as, or not the same, but I mean, clogged roads, right? Like everyone's, and so I imagine the zone model allows people to more in an organized fashion evacuate an emergency, is that kind of the idea? Well, it allows the general public to understand what zone they're in, what routes we may ask them to take well ahead of time, instead of us trying to get that across kind of in the heat of battle or during the emergency. Yes, exactly. So you're just working on Yolo County, are you working with other counties? I mean, this evacuation plan that's being promoted right now, is that just for Yolo County? This one specifically for Yolo County, we've got 91 new evacuation zones, so we've carved up the whole county, but all of our counterparts, there's 58 county emergency managers in the state of California, and so we work with our neighboring jurisdictions, so most of our zones that are on our borders actually say in the instructions, which neighboring jurisdiction you should call if we evacuate that zone, because we may be sending people into their county. I see, you mentioned 91 zones, I think we have a graphic we're going to show, just to show, give people an idea. This is the website that they can go to see these zones, but I see color coded them all. How did you carve up these zones? I mean, was that a long process? That's pretty much why it took the year and a half to get this project done, because it was good old fashioned, take some paper, roll it out with a map printed on it on a table, let all of our fire and law chiefs draw over in our instructions were kind of, don't worry about what the hazard is, don't worry about whether it's fire, whether it's flood, it needs to be good for anything, but think about how you as a person who would order evacuations would send people, would you send them north, south, east, west, what roads and carve up your specific area based on that. So lots and lots of meetings with all of the different fire chiefs, police chiefs, sheriff's office to design these zones. And our job in emergency management is to digitize them, make the app available, print maps for those who can't use a computer. And now the public education piece to get all the word out. Yeah, if people don't know what zone they're in, then all the work is sort of for not. I like the, I'm glad that you mentioned that different emergencies were considered, I was going to ask that because I wondered if each zone is dependent on the emergency, but now you've answered that question. All hazards. All hazards. I wondered if also there was, I know the concerns about people with disabilities or senior housing, senior, is that taken into account, sort of like sometimes the type of housing or the density of housing necessarily for these zones? Yeah, you usually see zones in a highly populated area, like a city be much smaller and some of the really large zones in the unincorporated area are places where not that many people live. So we can afford to create a larger zone and say, yes, we're going to evacuate this entire area. The smaller ones give us more options. We've designed things in there like rally points, which are a place where we can send transportation resources in case somebody doesn't have a car. And we've been getting a lot of eyes on our work since we started releasing it. So there's lots of good discussions with our in-home health support services, the aging alliance, aging commission. So everybody's kind of rolling up their sleeves and looking at what we're doing and giving us even more feedback. Yeah, I'm wondering about that. So is there opportunity to change the plan? Or is this sort of like, how does that, I mean, how do you take the feedback other than, OK, we'll do what we can? Or like how, you know what I mean? How do you incorporate feedback on something that's such an extensive piece of work already? Well, all emergency management plans are living documents. And after every single incident we have, we review them and we make changes for the better in case we have to do it in the future. Right now, the formal plan itself isn't even published. These are the tools that support the plan. So the actual written document, we have in a draft form. And some people have even thrown new edits just based on a flood fight we did up north of Woodland at the end of February. So we're incorporating those. All of our plans go out for 30-day public comments. And people can write down things that they see. And then we go and address those before they're kind of published and online. Sure, the sort of the normal government document procedure, the comment period and all that. So back to these zones, maybe we can throw up that website again and the graphic. How do people find out about what zone they are in? This is the website. Yeah, so if you go to evacuate.yolocounty.org, it's much more than just a picture on a website. It's actually a geospatial information system map. So it has what we call a widget typically on the left-hand side when you open it the first time. And you can put your address in. And it'll zoom in on the zone that address is in and tell you the prioritized evacuation routes for that zone and everything. And if it has location services enabled, so if you happen to be somewhere else in Yolo, you use your phone, you could even figure out what zone you're standing in at that time. So they go to that website, evacuate.yolocounty.org. And you mentioned your phone, which brings us to this Everbridge app. How is the phone part related to this evacuation plan? So all of those 91 shapes that are all multicolored there are pre-programmed into our mass notification system. So that any one of our dispatch agencies in Placer, Sacramento, or Yolo County can launch a notification for any one of the zones. For a very specific zone. Yeah, so literally a fire or a law person can get on the radio, contact dispatch and say, I need to evacuate zone 33. The dispatcher looks in our mass notification system, hits the template for zone 33, may have to fill in one or two blanks, but it's off, gone and sent to everybody's device. So it's designed for speed. And you mentioned if someone else is in another part of the county, would the, and I guess if they have their location services turned on, they would know that they're in that other location or how it like. So if they find that they're in a zone, that they're maybe not signed up for based on an address that's on their Yolo Alert profile, there's also an app available with Yolo Alert that you can download on your smart device that'll send you push notifications based on whether you're standing in that location at that time. So it does both. Okay. So the app, how do people get the information on the app for their phone? On the app, you can just go to the Google Play Store or to the iTunes app store and just look up Everbridge. It's usually an orange icon. And you can load that right on your phone and connect it with your Yolo Alert account and it'll push notifications. I see. So you've got to go to yoloalert.org first in order to sign up and register. So that's the first step is going to Yolo Alert. Yes, that's the most important step, especially for our residents, but if you have that app on your phone, even if you're in another county that also uses Everbridge as their mass notification platform, you'll get push notifications just if you're there. I see. And so if you register with Yolo Alert and you don't have a cell phone, you don't need the app, obviously, but how do you register with Yolo Alert if you don't have a cell phone? I guess that's the basic question. You can do it at any of our libraries in the county because there's computer resources there. You can call the Office of Emergency Services at 530-406-4930. And we'll even take it over the phone, make an account for you. We try to remove as many barriers as we can to getting signed up. And so if you're signed up and you don't have a cell phone, how do you get alerts or how do you... Well, if you have a good old-fashioned landline, they come via voice. And a lot of times we even record our own voice when we launch them so it doesn't sound like a telemarketer. So it's an automatic call that's sent out that there's an impending emergency or emergency in progress. Yeah, and we usually brand it with a solid nine's phone number. So we always can tell people don't hang up on all nine's because a lot of people are hanging up on those robocalls. And this is, for all intents and purposes, a robocall system. Right, except for it's a legal one. Yes. And it's legal and necessary. And I mean, the robocalls, unfortunately the growth of robocalls is making important calls like this to sort of get lost sometimes in the noise. Is YOLO Alert just for evacuation or it's for all emergencies? It's for anything that we need to push out. We tend to be pretty sparing on its usage in YOLO County. Some other counties you'll see road closures going out on their mass notification system. We try to launch ours when it's really something detrimental to people. So how are alerts as far as decisions about which alerts are being sent out is that sort of a chain of command and there's an emergency plan in place? Like there's, is that a, you know, what level I guess is that decision made? They're usually launched straight from what we call the field level. So whichever fire or law enforcement official arrives at that danger point is the one making that first call. So it happens as fast as humanly possible. Got it. And since UC Davis is part of the counties that have been, are all students, obviously you're encouraging them as well to sign up and find out what zone they're in. Yeah, we absolutely encourage anybody who is resident or even in the county for a good majority of their time. But UC Davis also has a mass notification system. So we work with their emergency management agency to make sure if we launch ours and it touches campus property especially, they may turn around and launch theirs. So in theory, students could be getting two alert notifications, better, safe than sorry, obviously. I was gonna ask how sort of your, how is adoption going so far? Are people signing up for your alert or like, or what are you hoping for, I guess? You're hoping everyone knows their zone, obviously. That's a big part of it. Well, we're hoping they all know their zone by the time we're done. I mean, that would be my dream that kids in school know their zone as well as they know to duck and cover for an earthquake. That would be the true measure of success. As far as yellow alert, we've owned it for four years. So we do periodic analysis on how many people have signed up during certain time frames because we launch it live for a test every year in the fall. Awesome, okay. And I guess everyone knowing their zone is super important just because in the midst of emergencies there's chaos and people just finding, everyone finding their loved ones and can be very difficult. So having that central meeting place seems like a key aspect or like knowing where your rally point is so people can track you down and once they know that you're safe they can go on and help people who are not or are in worse danger. So I think that's an important point to make. Anything else you wanna add about this evacuation plan or the yellow alert? Anything you wanna tell people out there in Davis? The biggest message that we have is to learn our procedures and everything, listen to us when we are giving direction because those mass notifications will quite frequently tell you what we need you to do, whether we need you to stay in place, evacuate which route we want you to use. That's really our biggest message is just to kind of get in the know about emergency management. Right on, well thanks for coming in today, spending some time educating people about this plan and the evacuation plan. We've been speaking to Dana Carey, the emergency manager at the Office of Emergency Services here in Yellow County. This has been In the Studio and my name is Jeff Shaw and please tune in next time for another episode of In the Studio. Thanks.