 Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the state of California, the U.S. federal government, the county of Sonoma, as well as the city of Santa Rosa, and all the coordinated agencies we're grateful that you're here. We'd like to be able to turn it over to the Governor of California, Jerry Brown. Thank you. Thank you. We're here to make sure that the government officials do everything they can to help and mitigate this horror that has been visited upon you. Everything has been this bad that I've ever seen in our state. The devastation, the horror, the displacement, it's truly something that none of us will ever forget. And for those of you who have lost your homes, or much less loved ones, we can never say enough, but we can do everything that we can, that government can do. And that is there will be aid from the federal government, there will be continuing firefighting, and it's not over yet, there are still fires that are burning, I flew over on the way here from Sacramento, there's plenty of smoke in the hills, so it's not over yet. And given the dryness and the ability of winds to just flare up at the moment's notice, you really have to be on your alert. I think what we can all see here is a tremendous expression of solidarity, of a sense of empathy, that we're all in it together. And it's not perfect, we're only human beings, but I want you to know everything that can be done that I can make happen will happen, and I will stay on this thing as long as it takes to get it all done for you. And if things aren't happening fast enough, call me. I'm not giving you my cell phone, but call my office, we'll do what we can, you've got local officials, you've got a lot of people here, so all together we should be able to get it done. Now, I want you to hear from Senator Diane Feinstein. She understands this stuff, she's been doing it for a long time. Senator, I'm not going to call her a senior senator. Our best senator for 25 years or 30 years, for 25. When you serve 25 years, you'll get yours. This is really a hard one. I've been going to these for the last 24 years. Down south with President Bush, with President Clinton, I've known the FEMA directors. I've watched FEMA grow, but I've never seen anything quite like this. For the hardship it's caused people, for the loss of life, for the damage to just beautiful places, for the loss of business and structures and wine grapes and all of the above. This is really one hard fire. As you look for something good to say, well, there are two things that are good to say. The first is, I have never seen people help each other more than I understand has been going on here. And it really seems to me that that's the spark that drives humanity in this country, that at times of great need real people come together and they help each other. That's the first one. The second one is really the firefighters because this is a hard fire. I'm going to ask the head of Cal Fire, if it's okay, if I tell you a little bit about the conversation, where are you Ken, a little bit about the conversation I had with you on the telephone. And at the time we spoke during the week, he told me, he said, you know, the fire outruns our people. We can't lay line. And I said, well, do you have all the air assets you need? And he said, the problem is with the wind and the smoke, it's hard to use them all. And then came mutual aid. And now people are pouring in firefighters from all over the western part of the United States. And from the briefing that your congresspeople, your councilpeople, your representatives, Senator Harris and I and the governor, have just had, indicates that there is a firefighting team here, and I've seen other fires and I've listened to this other times, that are unparalleled. What does this mean? This means you've got to listen to them. And if they say, do something, get out of here quickly, please do it. The saddest story I've read is when people don't make it out. And the other sad part of this is today I learned, well, it may not be over yet. And it looks like it isn't. The good news, frankly, is that they are able to put up some defensive lines and therefore be ready for the fire if it comes their way. I also want to comment that I've been sending my staff now two various fires for a couple of decades to help people as they go into the FEMA headquarters and register and see what aid they're entitled to. And there is a change here from what I've seen at least in the past. And there is funds for individuals provided you fill the criteria, and that is are able to substantiate your loss. There is a grant that's available. And that I haven't seen done before, so that's one good thing. I have sent up my staff to other fires, and we will be doing it now, just to facilitate for people, just to help them and just to have somebody that if you need me or you need something from our office, that's available. The human side is really the awful side of fires. You know, buildings are buildings, property is property. But people losing their lives, losing everything is a whole new dimension. So please, you're a great people, come together, stay together, ask for help if you need it. And my colleague and I, and I know the governor, and I know the council members that are here, the members of Congress that are here, we will all band together. And we will do everything we possibly can to be of help. So let's have a better day in a few. Thank you very much. And now, may I introduce my new friend and colleague, Senator Kamala Harris. Thank you. So I just, I just, oh my God. There are so many courageous people in here right now. And this community has endured such incredible loss and pain. And we can't do enough to support you. And I know this is a community of strong people. I know this is a community of proud people. But please take advantage of all the resources that are available to you. And this is going to be something that's going to, we're going to, it's going to be a long road ahead. We've met this morning with our first responders, our firefighters, the FEMA folks, local, state, and federal agencies. There's a lot of work still to be done, as you all know, because you live in this community. It's about recovery right now and still fighting fires. Some of them were now containing a lot more than we were in the last 24 or 48 hours, but some of them are still out of control. So part of why we're here is just to let you know that there are resources available to you. And we are hoping that the folks who are here in this gym can help be messengers for folks who can't be in here right now, who are barely holding it together, to let them know what is available to them. I spoke yesterday to the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which is over FEMA. She guaranteed that they were going to release all of the money, the federal money, around not only assisting the local folks who needed it in terms of our firefighters, but also the individual assistance money that Senator Feinstein spoke of. FEMA, you're going to hear it, is opening up centers to make that information available, as well as Senator Feinstein and my offices. We have folks that can help you apply for all of this. It's going to be overwhelming, it's already overwhelming. But the thing that we have seen in this moment of crisis is incredible courage. People who are not being required to, we don't know your name, we have not met, you're helping people, you don't know their names and you haven't met. It's incredible courage that we're seeing right now. And these coming days, we're going to have to see and do more of it, but we can't thank you enough. A few other things. When I was AG, we dealt with this when we had some other tragedies and we're seeing it now price gouging. Wherever you're seeing price gouging, it's a crime. So make sure you're reporting that to the AG's office and you can go on their website. Make sure that you are taking advantage of all that FEMA has to offer. Come to our offices and all of the legal aid associations that are available to help you with what you need to do, navigate your insurance, navigate whatever might be a resource that's available to you, but it's a daunting system. Because there's a lot of work to do, but right now we are just here to say that we are with you, support you, and it's going to be a long road ahead, but there has been so much courage coming out of this community and I can't thank you enough. Thank you. So I'm Ken Pimlott, Director for CAL FIRE, Mark Gillarducci, Director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. And I don't think we could have said it better than what the governor and the two senators said in terms of everything that's been going on. I will tell you, I've been through a lot of these in my 30-year career. You know, this one is a true disaster and I have never been more proud of the firefighters, the law enforcement officers, all of the emergency workers, like EMS professionals, the utility workers, everybody that has stepped up deserves that. Just like all of you, they've got families that have been impacted, they've been personally impacted, but nobody's going to give up on any of this until it's done and that's not going to be, we know, for a ways to come. So we can get into FIRE stats and all those things, I think later, let me just reiterate, we've got 10,000 firefighters on the fire lines across 16 fires today, 212,000 acres of burns since the beginning of this late Sunday night. The centers were right, we're making very good progress. Right now, though, we're not out of the woods, we're in the middle of a red flag, very critical fire weather conditions statewide. We're hoping for, again, good luck and this weekend as winds diminish here in Northern California, we've got winds in Southern California, we have ordered resources from all over the country, internationally, coming from Australia, it's stuff's been pouring in every day and it's not only coming to these incidents, but they're going to Southern California, other places where they're staging, we've stood up not only the National Guard, their capacity, but federal military assets. We're going to take it on and we're going to keep going until we're done. But as the senators, the folks talked about, it's a much bigger team doing all of this and I think I want Director Gillarducci to talk about really what's going on right now, really for now and the long haul. Thanks, Ken. If I could have General Baldwin come up and Commissioner Stanley, I want to introduce you to the state public safety leadership team that has been working seamlessly with and support of our local authorities in responding to these events. Chief Pamela mentioned 10,000 firefighters, we've had almost 500 law enforcement, another over 2,000 National Guard troops, aircraft, higher patrol officers and we are together in our day-to-day management. The way we are responding, we'll transition into the way we collectively recover. Recovery is not a local, a state, a federal, it's all of us, it's a whole of community. I can tell you, managing many disasters all over the world in my career, the successful disaster recovery is when the community comes together, stays together and works on collective solutions to make our communities better. That is our priority. And I'll tell you, my agency, which is in the governor's office, the governor's office of emergency services, the governor was clear on what his direction is and will continue to be. And our partners at FEMA, which now I'd like to have maybe Bob Fettin come up and introduce the regional administrator for FEMA, Bob Fettin. With our local partners, state agencies and our federal counterparts, we're rounding off and you may see in the news in other parts of the country how there's discourse between FEMA and the state and the local. That doesn't exist here. It will not exist here. Okay, I guarantee you. We are aligned and we are partnered. Now, let me just say this. The coming days and weeks and months will be tough. It's gonna be tough. This is where we really need to dig deep. I know we've all been impacted. Chief Pamela mentioned even responders that are out on the line have lost their homes have been impacted. This is where we come together. As the senator said, she's never seen a community come together better. But in the coming months, it's gonna get tough. And we need to continue to work and be solution oriented. And I ask you, well, first of all, I'll say to you, we are gonna do everything to keep this moving forward. We are gonna work with your local representatives, your city council, your county council to ensure that the recovery process moves forward and we make and rebuild this community better than what it was before the disaster happened. I guarantee you. So with that, God bless you. We are here with you. We'll continue to be as we move forward. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Tony Brownell. I'm with Cal Fire Incident Management Team One. I'm the operations section chief. I'd like to introduce. Hi, I'm Breck Ovea. I'm the incident commander from Cal Fire Incident Management Team One in unified command with Chief Tony, or excuse me, Chief Tony Gosner from Santa Rosa City Fire Department and Sheriff Robert Giordano from Sonoma County Sheriff. I'm gonna give you a quick briefing on the fires you guys are dealing with in Sonoma County. So late Sunday night, we got that phone call to come in here and give you guys a hand and things were not looking good. We got mobilized resources from the state of California and we came in here and aggressively attacked this fire. Some of the successes we've had. We've had some good repopulation. We repopulated 26,000 people yesterday and in Southern Santa Rosa area and we're working diligently to get the utilities back in service to get the rest of the area populated. But it does, it is a process. It takes time to make sure it's safe for the public to go back in those areas and we're doing it very carefully because we don't want any more injuries. I'm gonna talk about a couple of the fires. In the Oakmont Skyhawk area when the winds came up last night about three o'clock, there was a new fire reported. It burned aggressive and fast south towards Highway 12. Luckily we knew this one was coming because we know, as you guys know, besides the wind event that started this fire, there's been two other wind events since then and we've had to deal with those and this fire is not being an easy one. So we stacked our resources, we planned for it the worst. So when the fire did start, we were able to jump on it very fast and aggressively and we knocked it back quickly. It's still not 100% contained but we're working on it as we speak. The Geysers Fire, which is the northern end of the county, it's roughly about, excuse me, the pocket fire up near Geysers was roughly about 10,966 acres as of this morning. We're making containment on it, it's about 5% contained. We're trying to keep it out of the Geyserville geological area and we're also keeping it from spreading into any civilizations such as the Geyserville area. It did burn to the south yesterday. We got aggressive with the aircraft, we got it and slowed it down. We're making progress, it's looking better, it's not out yet. On the Tubbs Fire, Santa Rosa area, started up near Calistoga the first night and it burned down into Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa area is looking very good. We've had a lot of resources in there trying to get it cleaned up. There's two major hospitals affected by it. Of course, you know, Southern and Geysers, we're working diligently and getting those opened up and we're hoping to be successful the next day or two. It is a process, remember that. Currently up near the Calistoga area, the fire's still burning actively off St. Helena Peak and we're trying to close that up back there, contain that section of the fire so we're working again in Calistoga back in. On the Nuns Fire, as you know, this started as four different fires that burned in the one. We're just calling it Nuns Fire now. It's roughly 46,104 acres and it's 10% contained. When the wind came up last night, that was our biggest area concern and it did prove itself to be a problem. Down in the city of Sonoma, it did get out a little bit on the bottom and it made an aggressive run towards the housing area. We had resources in place prepared for that. You gotta remember, it only takes one spark across our dozer line and it fires off to the races again. It takes time to put all those hot spots out. Up near the top, like I said, in the Oakmont area, it was a fight but they made good progress. So things I'd like to mention are aircraft. We are working aircraft on this fire. We have 30 helicopters assigned to us with help from the California National Guard and Nevada National Guard. We have eight Cal Fire S2 air tankers assigned. They're at our disposal. Three very large air tankers including the new 747. The repopulation, like I said, we're working on it, it's gonna take time. We're in contact, we're working closely with the agricultural department. We know it is harvest season for the grapes. Cows need to be fed and they need to be watered. We are working to getting people back in to get that process going. I'd like to turn it back over to the incident commander. That's all I have, thank you. Well, good afternoon again. My name is Brecovia, the incident commander for Cal Fire Incident Management Team One. As many of you know, you all heard about the North winds that we were having, the red flag warnings that were predicted for last night. I think when we all got in around the midnight hour, we had no wind showing up at all and we were hopeful that we would escape the night without that. Unfortunately, about 2 a.m., the winds picked up pretty severely across the county. About 2.30 in the morning, we had some fire activity in the Southern Sonoma County area down around the Nuns Fire. Many of you know we had some evacuations last night in a portion of that area of the city of Sonoma. As we feared, some fire was still hung up on the hill and the predicted winds could push it down. That did indeed happen. We did have some contingency plans in place and we implemented those. Again, on the north part of the Nuns Fire, we had more fire activity that pushed out from Pythion Road down towards Highway 12. One good thing that we had from last night's wind is the pocket fire and the tubs fire that surrounds Santa Rosa did have no fire activity in them and no further fire spread with that wind. That is a very good sign for us. That means we're getting that much closer to containment on those fires. Unfortunately, we did have that activity in the south part of Sonoma County. And one thing from that that we learned last night and early this morning is it was one more testament of the cooperative effort of fire protection in California. Not only did the surrounding incidents send us resources when requested, your local fire departments that were already drawn down sent additional resources to support us. It was an amazing thing this morning. In addition to that, we were lucky enough to have a Kern County helicopter, one of few in the state that can fly nighttime firefighting operations and they were deployed and they were taking targets of opportunity throughout the night. I remain in constant communication with the other incident commanders from the various incidents around the state as they are still freeing up resources off their incidents as they come available and sending them to us. So I greatly appreciate their support. As you heard Chief Brownell say, repopulation has started. At the same time, we're still evacuating areas. We're trying our best to protect all of you at the same time getting you back into your homes as soon as we can and not a minute late. We now have over 3,000 firefighters and are one day closer to bringing this disaster to a close. My commitment and top priority remains to bring back normalcy to this community. Thank you. Hello everyone, my name is Tony Gosner. I'm the fire chief for the city of Santa Rosa. I just want to, hey! Somebody brought a Dalmatian. I just want to say that the last week has been rough. It has been rough for the entire community. The Sonoma Valley area, Santa Rosa clearly and a lot of Sonoma County. The unincorporated areas, Larkfield, Windsor, Mountain. There's been a lot of communities that have been impacted by this tragedy. I want to say Sunday when that fire started, it didn't take but about 10 hours to hit Santa Rosa and it probably wasn't quite, it was probably a little bit sooner. We did everything we could. We knew the fire was coming. We ordered up strike teams. We stood up the EOCs. We ordered evacuations. And by 12 o'clock, one o'clock, we had fire in Santa Rosa and it blew across the highway. By 2.30, we were in unified command with Cal Fire. We set up a staging area in Kmart thinking we were going to be safe. Took about an hour to realize that that wasn't going to work. So we pulled back to fire station three where we continued our command operations and the fire just ran through a large portion of Coffee Park. Terribly devastating, Fountain Grove area, Mark West Springs area, tremendous amount of homes damaged and people lost, very sad. It was a difficult night. Our mission, our mission that night, we knew it was coming. We did everything we could to get people out. Our mission is to get people out. We couldn't really fight the fire because it was coming too fast. We had to knock on doors. We had to go to every neighborhood to get these people out. We sent notifications via SoCo Alert. We knocked on doors and I gotta give a great shout out to the police services, Sonoma County Sheriff, Santa Rosa Police Department. They were outstanding for our community. They put themselves in peril along with every firefighter out there trying to get everyone out. It was not an easy job. And we weren't sure if even one of us weren't gonna come home. It was that bad. So the police officers did a wonderful job. Our mission is to help save people's lives and property. Clearly it was difficult. We knew there was a wind event coming up last night. We were prepared. So when that triggered moment happened, it was we evacuated all of from Pythian Road to Calistoga Road, both sides of Highway 12. We probably had 50 to 100 cops streaming into the area. Along with many resources from our staging area and other local departments. We got so many resources into that area to hold it on to Highway 12 and to get those people out to safety. It was flawless. And it was largely because of law enforcement and fire were prepared. That's what we can do when we're prepared. You have a bunch of brave firemen and police officers. I have to tell you, they are some of the best in the world. They've been working day and night. They're career firefighters. They're volunteer firefighters. They're everything. And everyone did a fabulous job. Everyone should be very proud of those emergency services because we are proud of you for the way you have handled yourself throughout this tragedy. So I want to thank all of you for being understanding, being prepared in the last few days for more evacuations even though we're trying to repopulate some areas. It's because of you, you can help us do our job. And that was very evident at 2.33 o'clock this morning the way it rolled. So with that, thank you very much and we'll take some questions. Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna get into questions in just about two minutes. We're gonna take a quick break. We're gonna invite your questions of Cal Fire and we have the regional administrator from the Office of Emergency Services here as well. But we're gonna take a quick two minute break if you can just stay seated or grab some cookies and water in the back. Questions for Cal Fire coming up in two minutes. Buenas tardes a todas aquellas personas que tal vez necesitan interpretación en español de todo lo que se está platicando, conversando acá. Mi nombre es Dinora, yo voy a estar en la mesa de la entrada al final y vamos a tener los aparatos que nos ayudan para asistir en la interpretación. Por favor acérquense y si necesitan alguna aclaración. Gracias. Let's open it up for questions for Cal Fire. We have questions for Cal Fire, questions for the Office of Emergency Services. We have questions for FEMA. We're gonna go straight to the back, same number would. Ma'am, I'm gonna have you just state your name and then whoever's gonna be answering the question if you can please repeat it for live stream. Hi, my name is Jane and this may be premature to ask this question but I know a few people with rentals in the area that are ready to be rented but I don't know if you have a centralized list yet or there's some contact people or should I ask that question later to another person? That question may be a little bit premature. We have a local assistance center that's gonna provide a lot of services but that question may be just a little premature unless there's someone, oh wait, maybe our FEMA representative can help us. We can turn, why don't we turn it over to FEMA here real quick? Can we have FEMA just take a stab? Can you repeat that, I'm sorry. See, I wanna know if there's anybody at this meeting that I could talk to that eventually will have a list of people in need of housing. So the question is trying to be able to find out if there's anybody you can talk to who has a list of people in need of housing. Yeah, so the local assistance center here along with county officials, state officials and federal officials will start collecting information on available rental assistance because we will wanna use that to get people in that have a need and we'll start capturing that. So I would go visit the local assistance center, let them know that you have available rental assistance. There will be things on the internet pretty soon that you'll be able to put that into and we'll be able to collect it and then be able to use it for other people that need it. Thanks. Oops, here's Mark. Thank you and I believe. Senator, can I just say, it's an easy start by either registering at a 1-800 number or getting online. That's how you start the process. As soon as you do that, a representative can reach out to you and then as soon as you can get to the local assistance center, you can walk through to get through all of the process to be checked in. But getting starting is the 1-800 number. Can we give out that 1-800 number real quick? Just really quick on the, Mark talked about applying for assistance. So right now, everyone knows that our nations and over the last month and a half has been hit by not only three large hurricanes but other hurricanes and now there's fire. So go ahead, the best recommended way to apply for assistance through FEMA is our disasterassistance.gov web address. So disasterassistance, D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R-A-S-I-S-T-A-N-C-E.gov is the best and quickest way to apply for assistance. You can also phone the 1-800-621 FEMA number or 3362. However, even with the thousands of operators we brought in to augment the thousands we already have, they're dealing with millions of people across the country right now. So it's a lot easier if you put your registration in through the web and our system pretty much auto determines based on what you put in and they'll have someone contact you back to then go look at the damages you have or talk to you further about it. Much quicker to start that way and get your information in over the web than to try to apply over the phone, okay? We're gonna go to our next question and we have Tomas. Hi, my name is Tomas. I live right by Costco. My question is more about like control fires and the communication between Cal Fire and us. I know there was a control fire a few days ago right by Taylor Mountain near the Bennett Valley area and we saw a lot of smoke by our house and it took us about four to five hours to figure out that it was a control fire and we were kind of panicking the whole time. So we just wanna know like is there a place we can go to figure out when these control burns are gonna be and or are you guys gonna be like posting on Twitter cause I checked all sources of kind of communication I couldn't find any information on it. So if you can tell me where to look, that would be great. So the question is notification on and locations of controlled burns. So we'll turn that over to Tony. Okay, what you're referring to is what we call backfires where we use fire to fight fire by taking the fuel away from it. Sometimes we get to plan those and sometimes the fire plans it for us. We don't always have time to make notifications to everybody until we're doing a burn. The one you're speaking for is we had to burn it out very quickly or it was gonna be past us. We are making an effort to do a press release or some kind of system that people know or even as much as letting the local Redcom know that we're doing that procedure but it takes a little time for it to get it out. We don't always have that time. So are you guys gonna just post it on Twitter or I know there's a press briefings but press briefings are like twice a day. So like. Right, point taken and we'll take that in there and maybe that's an opportunity for a Nixle alert but I appreciate that and I think the information will be really, really valuable. Next question. We'd like to be able to see before we go to James other questions out in front. I'm gonna come right up in front next. James? Hi, I have a question about undocumented immigrants. Are they gonna be able to receive funding from FEMA? So the question is will undocumented immigrants be able to receive funding through FEMA? So we require that one individual within the family as a U.S. citizen in order to receive assistance through FEMA but I would say that there's much other assistance available and you just start the process by applying through the system so that we can move the case on to voluntary agencies active in disasters or to potentially other forms of assistance but one individual in the family has to be a U.S. citizen in order to receive assistance. What about dreamers? Just hang on one second sir. As long as they have special status or social security card there, they would be able to receive assistance. Thank you. Next question from Aphrodite. Hi, two things for FEMA I believe or about the housing. There is a site already established online that's called SonomaCounterRecovery.org and they are matching housing with need right now currently and then also for FEMA to know that some of the hotels that are the call we got this morning we called up and tried to get a hotel room and some of them are the ones that have already burned down. So that needs to be updated I'm guessing. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna come up here to the stands. We're gonna go to Travis with the next question. I'm wondering from with Coffee Park when we're gonna be able to get back in there and get into our homes that have burned down. We're on pins and needles as a community and Office of Emergency Services says it's up to them. I know the electric and gas is cut off. Why aren't we able to go back through our stuff? And because we're all worried about looting we're hearing about looting people going through our things and we just need a piece of our lives back. So thank you. So the question is specifically the question is specifically for the people in the Coffee Park neighborhood they wanna know when they can go back or just in general when people can go back. Anybody's been right. Let me let Tony answer that again. Actually Coffee Park is a higher priority for us. PG&E is re-energizing a line in there today to get power back in that area. That is to get the main trunk lines back in. The houses that are damaged, there's hazards in there. The foundations are still hot even though it's been a week. The power lines have to be secured to go to the individual's service drops. The gas has to be cut off. We have to make sure there's no hazards materials in there and that area has some commercial stuff in there. We're working with the hazmat plants to get those areas checked off. That is one of our high priorities to get everybody back in the home but it does take a little bit of time to check all those boxes to get you back in. We understand you guys want the closure. You want to get in there and get you in but we have to go through the process and make it safe. Okay, you're welcome. We're going to go to our next question, Ken. I'd like to know what direction the fire that devastated the Fountain Grove area which did it come down the hill or up the hill? So you specifically want to know the direction? The Tubbs Fire. Tubbs Fire. The Tubbs Fire, if you can comment in the direction chief from Santa Rosa, chief governor, what direction did it come down? Did it come down the hill? Correct, sir, repeat your question one more time. What direction did the fire come down Fountain Grove Parkway area to the hotels that were burned or did it come up from there and go over the hill? It came down Mark West Springs Road, came up Cross Creek and down Fountain Grove. It did both. We're going to go to our next question with Buffy. Hi, I live in the Mark West Springs area and my house is gone. At about 11.30, Sunday night, we got a recorded call that said, prepare to evacuate. It is highly recommended that you evacuate. We took that to mean that we should think about evacuating, not that we should get out now. The way it was worded was very vague. And I'm wondering, was that a be prepared to evacuate if we call you to evacuate eventually call or was that the get out now call? And why not everybody in my community got that call? It was very confusing. Within 45 minutes, our community was on fire. So I'd like to know what that call was supposed to tell us and what was supposed to happen. Thank you, we go to Chief and I think we can also talk to the Sonoma County EOC as well. Chief, if you don't mind repeating the question quickly. So the question is, I understand it is, you're asking why didn't everyone get notified of the evacuation and were the evacuation, was the evacuation message to prepare or to evacuate now, is that correct? So when we stood up our EOC, we asked our EOC to notify everyone in the Fountain Grove area and that we have an alerting system called SoCo Alert through Sonoma County Office of Emergency Services. And you can pick points on a map to tell people that there's a problem coming. So in the middle of the night, this happened so quick we had to make a judgment call on where this is. We tried to make it as big as we could and send out that alert. Now you have to sign up for that alert. It's like the old Reverse 9-1-1 system. The Reverse 9-1-1 system is based on hardline phones. About five, six years ago, we had 380,000 hardlines. Today we have about 175,000. So we've been telling people to get to SoCo Alert, sign up for the alerts. So if something goes out, we can get the message out to you. And I can't remember what the message said but it was to evacuate. We wanted people to evacuate because it was coming. So Chief, I think the concern, and I don't wanna put words in your mouth, ma'am, but I think the concern was that landlines did not get calls, correct? Hey, hang on one second ma'am. Ma'am, let me get the mic in. Here we go. A lot of landlines didn't get called. A friend of mine whose house burned down who lives in my community, she didn't get the call, she has a landline. And that's not what the message said. It didn't say get out now. It said be prepared to evacuate, not evacuate. So it was very ambiguous. Thank you. Sheriff Giordano. Hi, Rob Giordano, Sonoma County Sheriff. The notification issues become a significant question for a lot of people. So let me start by explaining this. One, we're looking into all those issues because doing it right is really important. Two, there's multiple notification systems. We still use reverse 911 to call down phone lines. So landlines back to houses, but as the chief said, there's so many people don't have landlines anymore. So we've been advertising for a couple of years now, sign up for SoCo Alerts, sign up for Sheriff's Office, Nixle. You can pick how the alerts work. That's how we notify people on cell phones now. So do not go home today without signing up on SoCo Alerts and signing up for Nixle. That's how those calls get made to cell phones now. The other problem that we're finding is the be prepared, if it said be prepared, it probably was a be prepared. Cause some of the areas we didn't, we weren't expecting fire there right away, but we needed to get people ready. What happened is everything burned down. We lost cell towers and lost landlines. So a lot of people didn't get calls just cause they didn't have any way to get calls anymore. It went away cause the fire moved so fast. So I can't speak to your specific issue, but I can tell you, we've got a lot of these reports and we walked those lines went down, cell towers went down. That fire was unbelievably fast. The winds spun it up and pushed it through. Their deputies were running from it. So some people didn't get notices because the fire outran it. So that was part of the problem. But multiple alert systems were activated. Multiple alerts went out. I can tell you that our Nixle Alert and SoCo Alerts went out within the first 15 minutes and they were picking neighborhoods and reverse 911 calling. It's the system itself is only so good. I'm going to go to the next question with Melody. We have a few over in the stands across. Then we're going to hit the pause button to make sure that we hit the rest of our presenters. And then we're going to open it back up for questions. We're going to go to Melody. First, I want to say thank you all for your transparency and for being so helpful through this. It's really like you've done an amazing job. I just have a FEMA, I think related question. And that is for those of us who are in mandatory evacuation zones. I know a lot of us are, I mean a lot of people around here are renters. Is there any sort of like assistance that we may have, like that we may be able to get, even if there isn't necessarily damage to our place, like I don't think I'll be able to like go back to my apartment and live in it for at least a few weeks is what I've kind of been hearing. So what kinds of things should we be doing in the meantime? So the question I guess is a question for FEMA about resources for people who are renters and help being able to get back into a place. Is that fair enough? Yeah. It's not really about help out into getting back into our apartments. Like I know that's kind of unrealistic at this point, but just like assistance for having to be out of our apartments for so long is really what it comes down to. So the first thing I encourage everyone, whether a rental or a homeowner is to go ahead and start the process and apply for assistance. And the reason why is there are some forms of assistance that renters would be eligible for, not only in the form of potential smoke damage to your house once you get in there, but also, and I realized that the hoteling is limited here but we have transitioning shelter assistance where we'll pay for hotels in the interim until you know to get you out of the shelter to a temporary location until you get back to your rental. And then it's possible that if your rental is damaged we'll even give you temporary rental assistance and you know to start you off on a new rental. So start the process, go ahead and apply. Also there'll be other forms of federal assistance that from the FEMA application that you would then potentially be eligible for through SBA and other avenues and it would automatically refer you to them based on what you claim. We're gonna go to our next question right over here. We have Scott. Yes, thank you, Mike. So the question is, I'm over here, yes, sorry. The question is, I know some people who live up Calistoga Road and some of these roads which are understandably closed, they are very thankful that their house is still there. They would like to know when, what is the process for them to be able to go up to their home to visit it during the day when it's, there's no fires going on around there. Is there a process for that to go to your homes to check on any cattle or anything you might have? So the question is that, what is the process for those people who know their homes are still there who can't get back in because they're in an evacuation area? So we'll let Tony answer that. Yeah, as like I said before, there's a lot of safety factors you got taken in. Even your house is still standing. We're working with the county public works to make sure there's a lot of hazard trees on Calistoga Road that we're taking care of. There's falling rocks still in there and we also have a lot of firefighters in that area mopping it up to make it safe. Putting it out of the hotspots. We got to make sure it's completely safe around all the houses. The longer this goes on, we know the more frustrated you get and there's some options we're looking into to try to make that process work better for you. Let it be reporting one hour or another. We'll work it out. I can't make any promises, but we're gonna get you back in there as soon as we can. That is our number one priority. Real quick, if you don't mind just the question is, how are you gonna notify when folks can get back in? If we can get the IC up, need someone from Cal Fire to please step forward or the sheriff? So what is the process to be able to get back in? How will you notify the public? For the Sonoma County sheriffs and the center as a PD, most likely we'll go through a Nixle notification. So like the sheriff mentioned, you're gonna want to sign up for Nixle. We're gonna have local, it's the LAC which is, what's it stand for again? Local Assistance Center. Local Assistance Center and then we'll be able to help you that way as well. You have anything to add, Rob? Yeah, I would just say that the Sheriff's Office of Jurisdictions we're working with the National Guard. I'm sure Santa Rosa will too for escorting people back in. We'll go up on Nixle is this neighborhood, come to this location, we will escort you back into your house. So we will broadcast out when it's time to go back in and we will send National Guard troops with you. National Guard's been great putting people with us just to get you in there and safely and get you out. So that's the plan kind of in the micro size for the Sheriff's Office. We're gonna take three more questions in this round. We're gonna finish with this stand and I promise you we're gonna open it back up for the next round of questions after presenters. We have three more questions. We're gonna start with Vanna. Hi, I wanna start by saying thank you for the whole community just coming together and helping everyone. But my question is directed for FEMA. I was off of Hopper and I was renting and my home got burned down as well. So my question is what's expected as far as rentals, rental properties, I mean, are they gonna boom up? I mean, is there any kind of assistance that you guys can do for people that were renting, maybe didn't have renters insurance? What are we supposed to expect? So basically the question is what are the resources, can I paraphrase, and if I'm wrong, I apologize, resources for renters, how do we get people back into houses? Is that fair enough? Yeah, yeah. I will say, and I know we have our FEMA up here, we have the local assistance center and I think it's important that you take advantage of those resources, those are county, those are city, those are state, and they're federal resources and that is at the Old Press Democrat Building on Mendocino Avenue and so there are a variety of resources available and not necessarily just FEMA. So it's important if you are one of those people who have been displaced and have lost their homes, that that will help. But it is, there are a variety of resources. I think that's a great comment. And let me just start from where he left off. When you go to that local assistance center, there's multiple federal and state and local agencies there from the federal government. Social security will be there in the days ahead to make sure that if you lost your card, VA, USDA, Postal Service, they'll all be there. As far as FEMA's program, as I said, the first thing you want to do is apply online, disasterassistance.gov, 1-800-621-FEMA. Disaster assistance for individuals includes grants to help for temporary housing, to include rental, lodging expense, emergency home repairs, uninsured and underinsured property, personal property losses, medical, dental, funeral expenses caused by the disaster, along with other serious disaster related expenses. So it covers a broad range of things. Disaster grants from FEMA are not taxable income and they won't affect your eligibility or social security, Medicaid, or medical waiver programs, welfare assistance, temporary assistance for needed families or food stamps or supplemental social security income or other social security disability insurance. So you really need to start by applying for our program, whether if you're in the affected area, if you have some loss, go ahead and start applying whether you're a homeowner or a renter and we will work with you to help you determine what we can do to help you in your situation. We're gonna go to our next question. Hang on, Michael, which one? Jodi Travis-Saro from Office of Emergency Services wanna add to that. Please. Just a few items to add. One is your county officials here have ordered up tens of thousands of gloves and masks to make sure that you're safe as you possibly repopulate. So that's a critical component as your safety and health. The next thing I'd like to add is that the local assistance center, we have a complement of state agencies that include Franchise Tax Board, Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Department of Insurance to assist you with any insurance issues, the California State Licensing Board for contractors. So there's gonna be a complement or a variety of NGOs, state agencies, federal agencies, we come together and if we find that there's any other agency or department you need, we will bring them to the table. So let me add our county, state and federal counterparts are here to process and get you going on this recovery road. The local assistance center will be open every day 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thank you. We have our local assistance center, local director Susan Klosten here who's gonna present in just a bit. This is Andrew. Thank you. This question relates to the recovery and rebuilding process. A lot of people lost their homes and their architectural drawings, engineering drawings went up in the smoke. Where might they go in an effort to recover those drawings and start the rebuilding process? So the question is the rebuilding process, a lot of architectural drawings and things have gone up in smoke. Where do they begin to start the process of rebuilding? Mr. Rousseau, our clerk assessor recorder, I'll answer that and then Jody Travesero from OES as well. Thanks, Jim. Good question. First of all, it's a fairly new property. You may wanna check with city or county to see if they still have your building plans. But your last resort is is that in the county assessor's office, we get those plans from the agencies and we draw at least a sketch of your property and we have what we call a building record that shows when it was built, the quality of construction, the permit numbers, et cetera. So we can at least give you a sketch of what was originally built or if you had additions and permits for that, we would have it for you. I do ask though, you give us time to back to open up. County employees have not been to work this week and we're not sure what we're going back next week, but give us some time and then come see us in the assessor's office. 585 Fiscal Drive and you'll see the clerk recorder assessor. We're gonna go to our next question with Ollie. Hi, I actually have two questions. My house, I lived in Barquester States and my house was lost Monday morning. I filled out an application on FEMA's website last night and I was deemed ineligible due to income. What's available beyond that if there's a shortfall in insurance? Number two, clean up. After we have sifted through our belongings, who does the clean up? County Sonoma does it, when does it start? I have some horror stories that it could be a year before they come and do the clean up. If we have the resources available to do the clean up and get going, can we do it? So why don't we take the clean up question first? We have the deputy director from CalRecycle who will be overseeing Mr. DeRosa. So the first question, we'll take the second question first, which is how is the clean up gonna happen and what the process is. Pardon? How fast? It's gonna happen as fast as things are safe and that's a big part of it. So we'll have someone from CalRecycle answer that. Thank you very much. Thank you for your question, sir. Senator, would you like me to perhaps go through the process now or should we stick to the agenda? Why don't you, since you're up there, why don't we go through the process since this is gonna be the next big thing? Okay, just real quick. If you don't mind introducing yourself as well. Yeah, by way of introduction. My name is Ken DeRosa. I'm the chief deputy director for CalRecycle. Our director, Scott Smith, line extents his regrets for not being here. Please understand the 740 professional men and women that I work with extend their sympathies and condolences to you in this loss. CalRecycle may be an obscure state agency for you, but I want to assure you that in the event of wildfires, the last 10, we have been lead on the clean up and the removal of debris for those fires. A very important point was raised. Clean up begins when it is safe. When it is safe for crews to come in there, when it is safe for you to be there. We operate the state's cleanup program. I want to emphasize that this is a voluntary program. It is upon permission and agreement of you, the homeowner, that we will come in with crews to clean up the debris. And this happens in various stages. We will not just show up, this is voluntary. Please understand that hazards remain even after the fire is gone. Each parcel may have significant gross hazards, propane tanks, chemicals, household hazardous waste, ammunition, there's also lead asbestos, heavy metals that are released as a result of this fire. Safety is paramount. I can't even begin to understand what it must be like for you to have lost everything and I'm not gonna pretend to understand that. But please be safe. These are hazardous materials. These are dangerous materials. A team comes in in coordination with USEPA in the Department of Toxic Substances Control to remove those gross hazards, the things that are obviously asbestos laden, propane tanks, batteries, whatever hazards you may have around your home. Once it is safe for a crew to come in, we measure and record the foundation, the structures, the debris, the utility infrastructure, and property specific hazards. Not just the chemicals and the dangerous things that remain because asbestos may be within the ash and the other things that are there. But trees, power lines, other things that pose a risk to the safety of the people who live within that community and the safety of the crews that are going into those properties to clean them up. We obtain and evaluate soil samples. We establish cleanup goals for the project and we identify and remove asbestos-containing materials. In many parts of the state where we've been, there is naturally occurring asbestos in the soil. Mercury and other chemicals left over from mining efforts. We have to measure those so that when we are done, we have a clean parcel ready to be rebuilt. We remove metals and concrete for recycling, remove ash and other materials, and those are sent to landfills. We scrape and begin to remove contaminated soil to begin to smooth that ground surface. We remove the foundation. Essentially what happens is when we are done and when the soil testing is finally complete and reveals safe background levels, you'll basically have a parcel with about a four-inch grade in it because that's how deeply we dig down to that surface. If we need to continue to dig more deeply, we will continue to dig more deeply until there are safe levels that allow anyone to come in and rebuild. Public health safety and environmental protection are critical here. Lastly, once that is done, we establish erosion control and stormwater management to ensure that soils and other materials aren't running down into the street and running into the stormwater system. The funding for this comes from state and federal money. It is a voluntary program. I mentioned the right of entry form. The county may speak more about this when they have their turn on the agenda. The state does not charge you for the cleanup. However, it's important to understand through this process that the insurance portion that you have, part of that may be available for debris removal costs, and the county will work with you towards that. But the cleanup efforts, they range in price, and to get to your question, sir, they range in the amount of time. Until we know when we can come in, when we are tasked to begin to do that work, we're not sure how long that's going to be. We're working very hard, very closely, with FEMA and the Office of Emergency Services to do all of the pre-planning work that's necessary to align those contracts so that when we have the specifics on the number of parcels that we're dealing with, on where they are and where we have right of entry to come in, we will begin to mobilize. But there's still some advanced work that needs to happen and regrettably, and I realize this is unsatisfying, we're not able to give you a definitive timeframe. I hope that answers your question. Mr. Geroza, I'll just give one example. We had a fire that was just brought under control, the sulfur fire in Lake County. Repopulation was yesterday. Lots will most likely be cleaned up, started in three to four weeks. So it moves fast. I know there's a big gap. Gonna be very honest, the challenge that we have in the county of Sonoma and the city of Santa Rosa is the magnitude of the damage. But once this gets started, this is a machine. It goes fast. The two challenges that we have, the magnitude and weather. But we will see crews working through the winter to be able to clean up Santa Rosa. There's already been organizing calls starting Wednesday to make sure this is gonna seamless process. Ali has one follow-up question. Most of us that have insurance have a limit on the loss of use, two years. We're taking samples, we're taking samples to the laboratory or we put them on a 24-hour turnaround, two-week turnaround, how long is it gonna take? Who determines how many samples to be taken? And if I decide I wanna clean up my property, I could do it? Yes, to your second question, yes. You can clean up your property. You can hire contractors, you can hire crews to come in. That's why I wanna emphasize this is voluntary. This is for those who wish for our team, our construction crews. We contract with professional contracting and cleanup and debris removal companies who have worked with us on several locations. Lake County, Calaveras, we have crews right now finishing in Mariposa at the Debtwiler Fire and they've begun work this week in Trinity. But yes, sir, absolutely. If that is something you wanna do on your own, you absolutely can do that. We are very aware of that two-year window and we move quickly because we understand the need for that to happen on time. So the question is, won't be waiting a year? Mr. Rosa. Won't be waiting a year. We will move as quickly as possible. This is the largest debris removal effort. The last one was 2,000 sites that was Lake and Calaveras combined. And we're still working through that. We have given the county all of the per lot costs so that they can begin to recover those insurance costs and we did that within the definite scope allowed by their coverage. And we understand how to do that even better now. We have systems in place and procedures in place and we will endeavor to make that happen. Next question. Hello, everybody. My name is Alexander Gonzalez Jimenez. I am a community member from Windsor. First and foremost, I do wanna thank non-Red Cross volunteers and non-county members who have been helping out at all these shelters as well because they are not getting accredited for and I wanna make sure that they're being accounted and accredited for for all the help that they have been providing to the community. So one of my questions is, it's gonna come in with a little comment as well. There has been a terrible miscommunication with our undocumented community where they have been hearing that shelters are looking for some sort of identification and some of these folks have been misinterpreting this as like information that's gonna be passed down to federal government or stuff like that that has to go through a little system. Yet, however, a lot of the folks who are undocumented and who do not speak any English as well as our Latino community, Latino, Latino, and Latinx community, they have not been going to these shelters. Rather, they've been going to their family members in the community looking for shelter. Yet, a lot of these folks don't wanna come out here and look for the necessities that should be supplied to them. So, for example, I went down to Doron Beach myself with other community members and volunteers. We took a trip down to Doron Beach in Bodega Bay and I wanna go drop off some supplies and I did not see any folks out there. In the morning, I received news that a lot of... So a lot of the folks in Doron Beach told me that a lot of the folks actually left because they heard some miscommunication since they didn't understand the English language. So what are you doing as the county, as the community, helping these folks understand that we are providing them shelter and how are you getting this message out there for them? Thank you. Jody Travisero or the sheriff, who could probably do that? Well, so the question is how are we... Let me see if I get this right, okay. So the question is, how are you communicating with people who don't speak English, just Spanish speaking people, about the availability of services and where they can go, what they can do? Is that fair enough? I know, I'm sorry, it was... We're trying to get you an answer. First of all, one of the reasons, and I will tell you this, and then we'll see if we get someone from the county up here as well as the sheriff. One of the reasons that... Let me let the sheriff answer this. If you guys can be quiet, please. The reason for asking for identification or a name is not an immigration issue. It is a way to help us try to determine who is missing and who is not. It's as simple as that. ICE has already said they're going to stand down. Shelters are safe. Shelters are safe. You had a question? I'll follow it. So there is no law enforcement in this community that is interested in immigration status. I can't promise you that enough. We're putting out Spanish Facebook posts, Spanish Nixle posts, trying to explain that and clarify this rumor. The only reason for names is what was just reported. You are safe in the shelters. We're putting out in Spanish everywhere we can. Ask the shelter people. Misinformation is always a problem. So work hard to spread the information and they've heard what you've said and the shelters will put out more information about that. Let me just add also that all of the fact sheets are all translated in Spanish. We're translating everything in the shelters, the information that's being given. It's been given in Spanish and English. So we are absolutely reaching out to our Spanish speaking populations and we're gonna make sure that the communication is clear for them as well. So they are safe here and we're end-loved. Jeff Baumgartner. Yes, and my name's Jeff Baumgartner with the American Red Cross. I'm a current resident here in Santa Rosa and what I wanna say is the Red Cross is available for all people. We are available for all people. We do not ask for documentation. We do not check documentation. We are a non-profit organization not connected with government and we maintain the privacy of all of the clients who access our shelters. We've pushed out some statements in Spanish and English to that effect. We push them to the county and we'll make sure that they get to the PIO as well. And furthermore, for assistance for Red Cross, we also do not require a driver's license or any type of documentation. A letter to a residence or a utility bill or something like that would serve. So we're gonna suspend the questions for now we have other briefings. We will answer more questions. I promise you we will come back to questions. So Sheriff Giardano, we wanna give and then Mike Palacio from Highway Patrol we're gonna go on next. So Sheriff please, thank you. Thank you very much. I totally get you have a ton of questions so we're gonna be patient, listen to everything so please work with us. I have to leave so I'm gonna give this update for you on the Sheriff's Office and answer your questions up front but please ask me Sheriff's Office question so I can focus that so you can move on to other people. A lot of people here, lots of information about reentry so I'm gonna focus on just what the Sheriff's Office doing. So these are active fires, they're still very dangerous. Don't go back into the evacuated areas. 10 hours ago we were evacuating people out of the city of Santa Rosa and the city of Sonoma. This is nowhere near over and I know people are in different phases of recovery personally and how this is going. We are making great progress at the Sheriff's Office in searching and clearing areas and some of our jurisdictions where the fires cooled off. So let me talk about missing people a little bit because we're really working about life safety and recovering the victims of this fire that is our number one priority. Missing people to date, 1643 total reports. 1,420 located safe. Although those numbers are large you'll see the ratio is closing in because we have so many people hunting everybody down. 223 still outstanding and based on that 223 we're sending teams of people into the field to search their homes. So targeted search teams going out. Thank your National Guard. Thank all of the Bay Area law enforcement officers in the Sheriff's Office and Santa Rosa PD and Cal Fires helping us with all of this to get people into the cool areas, search the houses. Today we started what we call blanket searches. So after we search individual houses for people we go out and clear entire neighborhoods and that's only happening because the National Guard's here. So make sure you thank your National Guard troops. Everybody's goal here is to get you back into the neighborhoods we can get you back into as soon as possible. It's works for us, it works for you, it works for the community. Cal Fire, law enforcement, National Guard all the utility services PGD it's amazing to watch how it works together to do that. You will get advertisements from the Sheriff's Office saying this neighborhood is open come here we will have National Guard troops who can take you into your house now. The fact that they're here gives us the ability to put people in sooner than later. So that's how we're gonna work that process as we move forward to be pleased, be patient with us, sign up for SoCo Alerts. This alert thing is a really big deal. Don't go home today without signing up for it to get the alerts. The world has changed now that we're all running on cell phones and we don't have landlines. Landlines were easy, it's not like that anymore. Making sure I don't miss anything. Let me be real clear about this too. I know the timeline's a big deal. It could take months for some of these search operations. This fire is immense. But we have unbelievable resources here working backwards to put that back together. So be patient, keep asking questions, keep following our Facebook pages and watch what happens. But there are people out searching right now blanket searching areas because we're trying to open sections up for cars again. So that's what's happening. And I can take a few questions before I have to go. I'll let Senator McGuire run around for me. We're gonna take specific questions. Why don't we let Captain Palacio give a quick update so we can have questions for law enforcement in general. Quick update from Captain Palacio. Good afternoon, everybody. I'll try and be quick. I know everybody's restless and we have questions to get through. I'm Mike Palacio from the California Highway Patrol, the commander in this area. I just wanna say that we're very sorry for your losses. We've been working hard since Sunday night to make sure that your roadways were safe. We've had anywhere from 70 to 150 officers at one time from all over the state helping with from traffic control to evacuations to general law enforcement to keep your properties safe. That being said, we're still manning approximately 40 roadway closures in Sonoma County. And I would like to ask your cooperation and your patients while we do this. As many have said before me, we need to make sure that your properties are safe before we let you go in there. And we're working with Cal Fire and PG&E and all the utility companies to get you in there as quick as we can. Please be patient, be careful out there. There's still a lot of danger while these fires are hot. Down trees, down power lines. Be careful. The other thing I would ask is that during this time everybody wants to be on their phone. They want to get into their properties. They want to talk to their loved ones. They want to find out about certain aspects of what's going on in their life. Don't drive in text. Don't drive and talk on the phone. It's very distracting. Every day nine people lose their lives to distracted drivers. So please take an off ramp, be very careful. We'll continue to try and keep you as safe as possible. If you want an update on road closures, you can go to or follow our social media on Twitter and on Facebook, CHP at Santa Rosa. And also there's a county road website as well. It's roadconditions.sonoma-county.org. Thank you. So we're gonna take law enforcement specific questions because the sheriff is gonna have to get back. There's a lot going on. Do we have any law enforcement specific questions for either the sheriff or CHP? If you can just give us your first name. My first name is Brenda, thank you. I'm talking on behalf of some elderly people that do not have TVs. They do not have phones. So basically we're over in the Nens area and we were told out by the golf course that there was problems, but they've been watching over it. Summerfield, Tauailupa area. I don't know what's going on there. Also last night I called to the Sonoma County Sheriff's. I had received three phone calls in a row, not for my area at all, but they just kept calling. I understand that it can get busy and stuff, but when I called, the lady did not understand what was going on. Could you please tell us what's going on? Sure, yeah, you got three phone calls from us. Yes, right here. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'd have to look at that specifically. I'll tell you what, I'm gonna walk over and give you my card in a minute and I'll look at it for you. Perfect, thank you. Law enforcement specific, all right. Good to see you. Yes, my name is Lillia Gonzalez and I live in the Coffee Park area. You're indicating that you have so many people missing. Is there a list that you can provide us that are missing because if some of us know that somebody is safe or something, we can communicate that back to the sheriff in some form. Yeah, we're not given that list out for privacy reasons, but Red Cross has a shelter system where they can check for people in different shelters and I assure you that we're reaching out to all the family members quickly. That's what we're doing in the missing persons is calling the family members regularly to find out everybody they know so that we can track down where they are. So you'll get a call from us and look at the Red Cross website. We're gonna go to our next question. If you could please say your first name. Sure, my name is Stephen Curley. My question is about looting. It's about people coming in. We're just curious, what are your efforts with that and maybe something that we can, is there anything we can do? Yeah, that's one of the reasons we want you back in your name. I'm sorry, the question was, what about looting? How's the looting problem been and what can this community do to help us? So everywhere you are, call us if you see somebody suspicious. You are our eyes and ears. I don't care where you are. If it's a burned out area or not, if somebody doesn't look like they should be there, give us a call. We'll take a look at it and evaluate it. That's what we do. If you drive by a bit burned area and someone's not in a uniform and is in there, maybe you should make a call for us. That's what we're looking for. But here's what's going on. Right now today, there's 350 law enforcement officers working in this county 24 hours a day. We're rotating shifts every 12 hours. We normally run 30 people in the Sheriff's Office jurisdiction, so 350 is a significant increase. I took a ride myself out to the Sonoma Valley yesterday and there's cops everywhere, never seen so many. That's how we're secure in your neighborhood, okay? I drive around in an unmarked car. I had to keep turning the dark red light on because they wouldn't let me through the intersections. All right, that's how secure it is. Polluting reports have not been significant. I talked to the Santa Rosa Chief yesterday. He said there's been a few for him too. They probably have a few more than we do. They were up to about five arrests. We were up to about five arrests today. That's really good when you consider how much of the area is burned. Will stuff be stolen? Probably, I'm sorry. That's the reality of it, but we're working really hard to stop that. So if you see something you don't like, call dispatch, your eyes and our ears to get us out there in the field to fix that problem. Sheriff, we're gonna go to the final question for the sheriff from Ken. Yeah, my name is Ken. We've been told not to leave without signing up for Sonoma SoCo Alert. I went back there. I couldn't find any place to sign up. Where should we sign up? I'm sorry, I didn't hear the first part. You went where? We've been told several times do not leave here today without signing up for SoCo Alert. Is that correct? I'm sorry. Let me make that a little clear. It's online. Online. Go to Sonoma County Alerts Online. There's also a phone number. If you don't have internet access, you can look up the phone number either by phone or online. It's the easy way to get to pick your choices. My apologies. No one heard it. Let's give a round of applause to our sheriff and say thank you so much. Thank you for your patience. Stay safe. We're gonna get you back in soon. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you, Captain Palacio as well. We would now like to be able to bring up the recovery coordinator for the county of Sonoma. If I could have everyone's attention. And again, thank you for your patience. I know there's a lot coming at you all at once. Her name is Susan Klassen. She has to get back to the local assistant center. Susan Klassen is working with the county of Sonoma. She's our long time public works director. She's out of retirement to be able to make sure that we have a smooth operation to the local assistant center. She is gonna be providing you every detail about what you'll find when you walk in the doors to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat building in downtown Santa Rosa at the local assistant center, Ms. Klassen. Good afternoon, everybody. So as the senator said, I am the Sonoma County recovery administrator who has been working really hard for the last couple of days to open up the local assistant center. So we did open it up at nine o'clock this morning to a flood of folks. And we are asking for patience with everyone. We are learning this as we go along too. So our whole thing as we go through this local assistant center is to spend the day assessing what agencies we need there. If we don't have them, making sure that we have them. So it'll be getting better as we go along. The local assistant center is located at 427 Mendocino Avenue. It is the old press Democrat building. So a lot of people around here can relate to where that is. We are opening daily from nine to seven for now. As we go forward, we will continue to reassess and make sure that we have the services that we need and that we still have people coming in. So I can't tell you how long it will be open. At this point, we are planning to go through at least next Sunday and then beyond that. And it could be weeks, it could be a month, it could be longer. It just depends upon how many people are there that need services. Our mission is to provide people with a one-stop shop for information and services that they need. This is a collaborative of the federal agencies, the state agencies, the county agencies, and the city of Santa Rosa agencies, as well as we have available in there non-profits and in the community that also provide services. So our goal is to take in the people that need assistance and process them as efficiently as possible through there and give them as much resource and information as we can while they're there. So the first three hours we were open, we processed about 125 people through. I'm thinking now we're probably double or triple that by the time we close today. I wanted to briefly go through the kinds of services that are there. There are lines to get in. We're trying to make people as comfortable as possible. One of the things I would say is that what we're finding, now that we've been open a little while, is that people are spending about an hour to an hour and a half inside the facility getting their information. And so what we're trying to do is have the facility actually open from nine to seven, but we'll probably likely not be able to take people in after six o'clock because they will be there for another hour, hour and a half. So please try and get there by six. Someone mentioned right of entry forms related to debris removal. We are working on having those available at the LAC right now. We call it the LAC, sorry, acronyms. So we have people from Human Services providing public assistance. We have CalFresh. We had MediCal resources. We have lots of people in there to help with rapid rehousing. We have a lot of people in there to answer questions on the city side and the county side on what you are going to need and the process that you will need to go through to rebuild. We have small business assistance. And our primary thing that we have there really is FEMA. So we know that it really is more efficient to register with FEMA online, but we also know not everyone has access to online. So we are registering people with FEMA in there and we are going to be staffing up to actually provide just computer availability for people who want to online register themselves while they are there if they don't have access. Other folks that are there, I think you are going to hear from some of them. So we have people to talk to you about restoring your vital records, how you are going to take care of your taxes, how you are going to get utilities restored, just a multitude of things. And as I said, what we are constantly doing is taking in the information of what people need, reassessing and adding more services if we need it and we have room. So again, we will be open for a while. I encourage you to kind of try and maybe go by the facility, see how long the line is and meter as people come in because we are trying to respond. But we have a lot of people down there, they are working really hard. And what we are hearing from the people that have been through the facility is really positive feedback that they feel like they are really getting the information and services they need and they are really pleased with what we are providing. So we are really super happy about that. So again, more information to come. I know the county is putting stuff up on web, on Twitter and other things that will keep you informed as we reassess and modify how we are operating the facility. So thank you for your time. As your representative for Cal OES here, I want to first ask for your trust as we go through this process. As we go through these briefing sessions and listening sessions, we are gathering needs and addressing those needs over time. By tomorrow, we will have a second local assistant center ready for others to come in and register at in the Sonoma Valley. In addition, we will be sending teams of community outreach people and if we can listen to your concerns, we will address them in the best of our abilities as our goal is to maximize all available assistance to you that we can. This requires a patchwork of solutions, a quilt of solutions, and we're trying to bring them to the table so you can navigate through the system of recovery as easy as possible. You may have to come to these centers multiple times to understand fully what's available. We welcome that. We will continue to communicate and I want to thank you. We're going to open up for questions in just a moment. When it comes to all these issues, but first we'd like to be able to bring up the mayor of Santa Rosa and the board chairwoman for the board of supervisors of the county of Sonoma, Chris Corsi, as well as Shirley Zane. And then we're going to hear from the postmaster for Santa Rosa about what you need to do with your mail, how all this is going to work in the months and years to come. Here's Shirley Zane and Chris Corsi. Thank you. If you do still have a smart device, Sonoma Strong, that's our message, Sonoma Strong. I've never been so proud to represent you. You guys are really incredible. Okay, you're here more for information though, so here's a little bit more information I want to give you. If you want to, if you need a hotline in terms of still where to go and the shelters or you want to report a missing person or a found person, again that phone number is 565-3856. And we've already done 30,000 calls in the last five days, so people are using it, please use it. Also, I want you to know there's still beds open, we've still got 24 shelters open, and so if you know somebody that needs to be sheltered and they just haven't gone to an evacuation site, please go, we still can shelter people. We, as of not 11 o'clock a.m., about 2,000 beds were full, but there's still space for 3,700 in 24 shelters. And then, yeah, it's great, isn't it? We've got lots of services out there, and you can get medical and mental health services from those shelters. We're really trying to provide as much as we can there. And then I want you to know that we're already working on rebuilding and recovering. We've had inspectors out there inspecting damages to buildings, 1,900 inspections already in two and a half days. So they are just really busting their butts because they know that we gotta go to recovery and we gotta go to build as soon as we can. With that, I'm honored to represent you. You guys are compassionate, courageous, and strong, and we will continue to be strong leaders because you inspire us every day. Thank you. Like nothing I've ever seen in California. Those were the words of Governor Jerry Brown a little while ago. Like nothing I've ever seen in California. This is a man who has been a four-term governor in a state that has earthquakes, mudslides, flooding, and yes, wildfires. He's never seen anything like that, like this. So what we're gonna see now is a recovery from this disaster like nothing he's ever seen before. And like nothing anyone has ever seen before. So I really appreciate that Governor Brown, Senator Feinstein, and Senator Harris came here today to see what this community has suffered. I left each of them with a message, one message, that over the next several years are gonna need your support. We're gonna need your resources. We're gonna need your help. State and federal government are our partners in this. Each of them told me we would have what I asked for, what we need. So there's been a lot of information passed around in this meeting, maybe a little information overload. I'm not gonna read all the numbers, the phone numbers, and URLs to you that I have on my script here. I'm gonna tell you three things. To get Nixle alerts, text your zip code, your five-digit zip code to a six-digit number, 888-777, text your zip code to that. For emergency information, up-to-date emergency information, not to report an emergency, but to find out what's going on in the city of Santa Rosa, you can find a ton of information at srcity.org slash emergency. And if you wanna talk to somebody in person, a real voice at the other end of the phone, call 543-4511. You can speak to one of the city staff, and our city staff is working 12-hour shifts around the clock. You can talk to someone in English or in Spanish about the concerns that you have. We need to stick together, folks. It's gonna be a long haul, but we're on our way. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd now like to bring up the postmaster for the Santa Rosa area, Michelle Tucker, give you an update on how you might get mail and things like that. Thank you. Good afternoon. So, right now the Santa Rosa Carrier and Nixx has been evacuated. So we have had to relocate our services to our facility at North Bay. For those that are serviced by the Zip Code 95403, the Fountain Grove portion in Coffee Park, Larkfield area, we are having pickup mail at the Roseland Station today through 4.30, tomorrow from 9 to 4.30. We will remain at the North Bay facility until we can actually physically move in. We're hoping to do that on Monday, but services will still be provided at Roseland. That's at 2585 Sebastopol Road. For the 95404, 05, and 09 Zip Codes, mail pickup is at the Santa Rosa main office on 2nd Street from 9 to 4 today, which we're already past, and tomorrow also from 9 to 4, and we'll remain that way. What we are trying to do is help our customers here in town get change of addresses filled out for a temporary forward until you know where your permanent location is gonna be. We wanna help you get your mail so you don't have to come down to the post office and stand in some of our lines. We also have the Sonoma Valley customers that have been hit with this, have been impacted by this. They are currently at the Casa Grande Station in Petaluma that is located at 1601 Corporate Center. They are doing the same with mail pickup from 11 to 5 tomorrow, and we'll continue there until they are allowed back into their facilities. We are happy to help you with trying to open up a PO box. If that is where you would like to relocate your mail during this interim and your situation settles. We have PO boxes in all of our facilities across Sonoma and Marin County. So depending on where you are located right now. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we now would like to be able to bring forward the Sonoma County Clerk Recorder Assessor. He's gonna be talking with you about critical document recovery and property taxes, how this is gonna work in the recovery process. Here's Bill Russo. Thank you, Mike. First of all, my hearts and prayers go out to all of you. I know we've all been affected in this. I'm a lifetime Santa Rosa resident. Father went to Santa Rosa High School, so I'm part of your community. We're split some time today. I have with me the tax collector, Eric Rosa, and also Diva Marie Peroto, who's my Chief Deputy Clerk Recorder. These are the experts in this area, and these are really important things for you to know because if you're a property owner or if you have born in Sonoma County, you've been married here, we have your records. I'm gonna cover the Assessor part and then Eric's gonna cover tax collection and then Diva's gonna come up and talk about vital documents, okay? So four things that I wanna do for you today. Just to let you know, the county workers are not back in their offices yet, but we've been working, a lot of our managers are behind the scene been working most of this week. What we're gonna do, we're getting a lot of data from the sheriff and we're hoping to work closely with fire, is to do mass reductions on the properties that were damaged. All of you probably have seen aerials, there's a lot of good information out there. We're gonna work in area by area and do these reductions as quickly as we can. And Eric's gonna talk about the timing of the tax bills because all these properties have tax bills out there now and Eric will talk a little bit about the reissuing of bills. So just know that we're gonna do it mass and that you don't have to file a form with us. We're getting data, we'll take care of it just with the data and we will handle it. We have over a year to put a claim in and we're gonna do a mass appraisal so you're not gonna have to do any work on that part. But what you're gonna need to do, those of you have been misplaced, we have your current mailing address for the bills, right? So if you have been relocated and know you're gonna be there probably through the first of the year, we have forms you can fill out to show us, okay we have a PO box now or perhaps you've relocated to a friend's. We have formed some in the back of the room today and there's some on our website. We are at the LAC, I was there this morning for the first five hours and it's been great, that's been the number one question people have had is how are you gonna find me when you do my reduced tax bill? So the other thing that I need to let you know is that one of the questions we get a lot is what happens when I rebuild? Are you gonna reassess and now I'm at 19, 19 or 19, 20 prices and my tax bill is gonna be at higher? Well under Prop 13, which was the property tax law passed in 78, it allowed you to, if you rebuild after a calamity, if you build the same house, same footprint, then you keep your Prop 13 base of your value that you had before. So rest assured. Now if you wanna build an addition, that addition's gonna get a little bump but the rest of the house gets the Prop 13. All this is gonna be on our website and just keep checking our website, the forms are there as well. And then, let's see. And then the last thing, I'd just like to introduce Eric to come up. Eric is our auditor, controller, tax collector, treasurer, he's gonna talk to you about the timing of the bills and then he'll introduce Steve and Marie. Good afternoon, Eric Roser, auditor, controller, treasurer, tax collector. Over the last couple of weeks, many of you have received property tax bills in the mail and are probably wondering what you need to do with them. If you have not paid your bill yet and you were in the fire zone and incurred damage on your property, you'll be eligible for a reassessment, as Bill mentioned. Please do not pay your original property tax bill at this time. A corrected bill will be coming as soon as we can process them. We'll be working with the County Assessor diligently to get those out as soon as we can. If you have already paid your property tax bill and we have deposited your check, we will be issuing refunds once we know what your corrected bill amount is. If you have mailed your check and we have not cashed it, we are doing our best to identify parcels that are within the damage area and setting those aside. You may wanna consider putting a stop payment on your check if you know that you've incurred damage and then you will just get your corrected bill when the time comes and pay off of that. When the corrected bills come, there is a 30-day deferral period to make your first installment payment. It's 30 days from the date that the corrected bill is mailed and then depending on the timing of the corrected bill, your second installment will either be due April 10th, 2018 in accordance with your normal secured property tax bill payments or if the corrections happen later in the year, you, the first and second installment may be due at the same time but it would never be sooner than 30 days after the corrected bill is mailed. We, please don't rely on being, identifying your parcel through the damage assessment inspection process. Please reach out to the tax collector's office. We wanna help you through this process and we may not know you're out there. We don't want people to slip through the cracks. So if you proactively reach out to us, that'll help us make the process smooth as we go through the corrected bill process. There's three ways to contact us. As Susan Klossin mentioned, the local assistance center is open and the tax collector has a table there. It's mailed during the entire time that the local assistance center will be opened. There will be forms there for you to give us your information so that we know that you're part of the disaster. We have a tax collector email address. It's taxcollector at sonoma-county.org. And then we have a tax collection telephone line which is 707-565-2281. And as you can imagine, this year devastation of this disaster and the fact that the county complex is still not open, it's gonna be really difficult to deal with customers via phone. So I would encourage you to visit the local assistance center or contact us at the email address I provided. My office and the county assessor will be providing frequently asked questions. We'll be posting those to our website and we will continue to provide updated information on our website as it becomes available. And now I'd like to introduce Diva Marie Proto, Chief Deputy Clerk Recorder to talk about critical document recovery. Hello, we know a lot of people lost records in the fire, including birth, death and marriage certificates. Since the governor did proclaim a state of emergency, if you lost those records, you are entitled to receive free certified copies of those records throughout the state. Our office here in Sonoma County will have records for events that occurred in Sonoma County. People were born here, who passed away here or purchased their marriage license here. It's not the location of the ceremony, it's where you purchase the license. Each record is held by the county in which the event took place, but the free certified copies are good throughout the state of California. I do have applications in the back for both Sonoma County and for the state. We have people at the local assistance center. Our office is open, we've been issuing copies. We will be open from eight to four PM this next week unless anything happens. The easiest thing is for you to come into the office, we'll be able to issue the certified copy right over the counter to you. Otherwise the state or our office, if you fill out an application remotely, we'll be able to mail it to you wherever you need it to go. Thank you very much. I'd like to bring up now, appreciate it. Barry Anderson, Senior Vice President for PG&E. I will tell you, if you haven't seen it, there's an army of PG&E people out there and he's gonna give us an update on that. Well good, thank you very much and we're very glad to help stand this community back up. It's been, I had experience with the Valley Fire and I currently am the one responsible to bring back up Mendocino, Napa, Lake County and here in Sonoma. And it's a, I've been out with crews and having safety briefings with them and I can tell you that the destruction is just tremendous and our hearts and thoughts go out to all the families of the victims and I just wanted to let you know that we're making great progress. Here specifically, we've got a base camp out at Roanard Park. It's housing 1,500 of our workforce. They get three meals a day, we do laundry there, they get materials and they get fuel and it's the largest base camp ever in our history. I wanted to give you some insight on how the process works and it all revolves around safety. Our Cal Fire partners mentioned it earlier. On Monday, they get with us to de-energize facilities and shut in gas facilities and it's all about making sure first responders can do their job. I know it can be inconvenient. Right here in this community, some of your lights have gone on and then back off but it's all built around the fire and how it progresses and backs down. It's also about our employees and their safety and when you get out there and you see the terrain they work in, the roads can be narrow and there can be a lot of congestion based on damage but I can assure you we're doing everything we can to make sure your gas and your electric service comes back on as soon as possible but we'll continue to work with Cal Fire and make sure it's done in a safe manner. Thank you and we'll be here to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Mr. Anderson and I wanted to bring up Gina Sanguene from the California Department of Insurance and this may be really, really valuable information for you. So. Thank you. Hi everybody. I just want to give you a brief overview of what the California Department of Insurance does. I'm from the Consumer Services Division. We have a consumer hotline and the hotline phone number is 1-800-927-HELP-4357. The consumer hotline will answer questions regarding residential, commercial, fire insurance claims, auto insurance claims, fire insurance availability, also life insurance, life insurance claims and locating lost policies. If you, the next, also, I'm sorry, you can file a complaint with our Department of Insurance with our department. It's called a request for assistance. If you are having any type of problems with your insurance company, agent or broker, if you have a desire, you can file a complaint with our department. You can file that complaint either by going to our website and we also have additional information on our public website I'm gonna give to you. Our website address is www.insurance.ca.gov and some of the information you can go to is residential insurance and homeowners and renters information. You can get a home inventory guide on our public website. You can get information about don't get burned after a disaster. There's more information. I'm not gonna give you all that information but there is one other part of the website that you can find some consumer resources for recent wildfire victims and those resources would be through press releases from the Commissioner Dave Jones regarding the wildfires. So that's, there's a lot of information. On our website it does translate into all languages, all different languages and Spanish is one of those. Also when you contact the consumer hotline we do have language assistance availability, okay? I am at the LAC Center so please come and visit us. We can have more of a one on one, okay? Thank you. Thank you. We're gonna open it up for questions. We're gonna come on back and please, any questions that you have, we're gonna bring all of our experts back up. We're coming back to you ma'am. Just give us your name one more time. Thank you. My name is Kristen and I just wanna say a few things. My mom is a survivor of this tragedy. I so appreciate all of the help from the federal state, the county. My mom is walking around with Mayor Corsi's words from a editorial or letter you wrote about the resilience of Santa Rosa is fabulous. A couple points I would ask, I would beseech you to consider as a county that there's some kind of dialogue or reflective listening session like a story core. I think everyone in this room has a story. My mom asked at nine o'clock at night between eight and nine on Sunday night called Santa Rosa police about the smoke and was told it was probably a drift. Just drifting from somewhere else. Totally, I totally get it. We are astounded by how fast this fire moved. No blame, but I'm just asking that maybe interagency cooperation or updates. This was a phenomenally fast moving fire. She was only awakened by her neighbor calling her twice. She has hearing aids. She didn't hear. We were fortunate to our neighbor to have a bullhorn once, but maybe a doorbell if there's any possibility ever again to just a debrief on this in the future. I wanna thank every neighbor, every one of you here had a role to play and my mom's here because of that. And thank you to everyone sitting here who survived this. Lastly, if there is a way to ask, what do we do if we do get back on property? If there's nothing there, like is it even worth digging? Like is there someone at the local assistant center to kind of just go over that? This is all new information. We're gonna, we have a piggyback here. Okay, my daughter is actually more upset than I am and I've made that discovery when she came down from Oregon, insisting that she come. I am doing very well because at my time of life, it's memories that I made and I can get rid of for her. It's things that are to come to her, were to come to her and she's not gonna get, no, I just have a practical question for you and she wouldn't tell me what she was gonna say. Sorry, what I would like to know is a timeframe because I'm a little sobered by what the cleanup man said. We've been waiting to get permission to go up by Centennial and our assumption or hope was that we'd be able to do that maybe by Monday. From what he's told me. Put the mic closer so people can hear. Oh, sorry, I have a loud voice. Okay, I would like a framework for what the stages are. Are we going to be able to go and see with supervision or whatever before we can go and touch? Before, and when in my case, there's nothing to touch and there's nothing to do except wait for the cleanup. But when the cleanup occurs and it's time to start planning, how will we know an approximate time? I don't want dates. I know nobody's ready for that. But is there a sequence of what we will have to go through? Thank you. Okay, let me start with part of that and then I'm going to turn this over to our expert from CalRecycle. First of all, everybody wants people to be able to get back to their homes regardless of the condition. It's simply right now a matter of safety. So once it has been deemed safe by the utilities, by CalFire, by the authorities it be, people will get an opportunity to go back in. Initially probably under some sort of an escort to make sure that everyone is safe when they're up there. So once that is going to come, we can't give you an exact timeframe. But I will tell you, and I'll let the CalRecycle person tell you what will likely happen very quickly after that. And as far as your daughter's question comment there, some sort of, I'm taking it away, some sort of a debrief on a listening session, we hear you, we absolutely have to learn from all of these tragedies so that we can be better if another tragedy happens. So I know that there will be an extensive debrief process on this and we appreciate that input. Thank you, so I'm gonna let the CalRecycle, actually, oh, someone here, we're dueling. Jody will answer. Jody, I'm gonna have you cover, first of all, when folks are allowed to get back in, if you could please cover for those homes that may be still standing, what you do with all your food and all of your waste. And then if you can also go over gloves and masks to be able to sift. And then the other item is let's go to the next phase with DTSC, the Department of Toxic Substance Control, for that, so please, Jody Trevacero. Okay, some of you are sheltering at American Red Cross Shelter, some of you are out there at family and friends homes. So the first thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna receive a notification of some kind, either through the Nixle Alert system, or media, or at a town hall, but as soon as it's safe, you have the support of the first responder community to go back home and check on the status. Those are very difficult processes to go through. So we're gonna make it as easy and safe as we can to equip you to go back and look. There are a variety of scenarios that you could face as you get back there. You could see that your home is there. You could see that the home is completely gone. You could go, you could see that it's there and maybe there is smoke damage. You could get home and see that, a mixture of these scenarios exist. So the challenge we have is making sure that we get you back safely, we give you some private time to kind of figure out sort of what the situation is, and that we then provide a multitude of support to help guide you through recovery. And then the simultaneous effort by the county and the state and the federal government is to of course have these resources available and ready to you when you are ready, now if necessary. And that includes working with the county and the affected areas to put, for instance, dumpsters out, okay, and make sure that you have good instruction on how to handle a particular type of waste. We don't want you touching things that are dangerous. We will provide you with instructions from your public health officer on how to handle things. And then of course, given the scenario type, there's a patchwork of solutions we work with to support you in moving to the next phase. This is not gonna be easy. This is a major disaster. And I'm sorry, but we're here. We do this and we will rebuild. And I'm gonna give it to CalRecycle and I'll be here for you personally. Thank you, Jody. So I think Jody kind of laid it out rather effectively. There is the repopulation that needs to occur. There are the safety protocols that will be put in place for that. Gloves and masks to allow you to remove spoiled food. But Jody makes the very fine point as to Mike, correct? Jim, forgive me. Jim makes the point as well. It's all about safety. It's all about making sure that you are not putting yourself at risk, getting in there and doing that. So once the repopulation occurs, once the assessment happens, we will bring in resources will come in to remove the gross hazards. But to get to I think, what is your fundamental question? What is the signal that that process is beginning? That is the key question I heard you ask. The right of entry form and that communication will likely come from the county. And I'm basing that on our experience and how this has happened in previous sites. Lake Calaveras, Kern. That communication will come from the county to let you know that is your opportunity if you wish to pursue it. As I said earlier, it's a voluntary program. You don't have to go through the publicly funded process to do that. Everyone is available to do that of their own volition. But that communication will come from the county. They will let you know that now is the time to begin to build that. The commitment, as I understand it, as I heard Calloway say, it is that constant degree of communication to keep the community informed about what is happening when and where your opportunities are. The LAC is the key element of that process, letting you know what's going on. So I hope that that answers your question. I realize that the fundamental question that you are asking is when does this begin in terms of recovery? And it's unsatisfying. We simply do not know. Mr. DeRose. Her question is there is a two-stage process, a sort of guided and facilitated look at each of the parcels before the more professional and thorough cleanup and effort happens, and that is correct. We're gonna go to our next question right in the back. Hi, thank you everybody for this. My name's David. My questions for assistance, income assistance, for all the per diem county office of education employees like myself, what's the most efficient agency to go? I went to the government assistance website and I thought I might need to go to unemployment insurance. Do I go to my local office? What's the easiest way for me to find out if I qualify for income loss because my site's closed indeterminately? Thank you very much. So I know we have the superintendent of schools here. Mr. Harrington, I don't know if Cal OES wants to be able to take this one. I'm gonna have you repeat your question one more time. So it's about per diem income assistance for substitute employees in the San Rosa City Schools and the Sonoma County Office of Education. Where can I find out if I qualify for assistance? I'm not able to go back to work and I don't know when I will. Is it go to unemployment insurance? Is it go to this website I went to last night and go to FEMA? I don't know what, yeah. Why don't we go to... So per diem assistance for substitute employee or substitute teachers throughout the school system and other assistance? Yeah, I was presently located at a site since the beginning of the school semester. I was filling in as a substitute admin and I was gonna be there and it was indeterminately. So all my income is so washed. Yeah, so we have the county superintendent of schools of here, sorry. This guy, he's gonna help answer the question. At this point, we don't know who we are. You are a long-term sub. Yes, I've been nine years. Okay, but are you a long-term sub with a permanent assignment? I'm in a long-term assignment with the Burbank Elementary, yeah. Okay, your district, more than likely, they have to have you on your payroll system, so I'm assuming that you get a regular paycheck? Through scope, yeah. They all come through scope, but at the end of the month or in the middle of the month? 10th of the month. So you're a supplemental employee based on that payment system. You may not have the same advantages as a full-time employee. I don't know, I can't answer that question and I don't know how your district's doing it, but what we did yesterday was set up a system for districts whereby employees can make a draw against other checks. And we're gonna set that up so you can draw twice a month on your paycheck. What does that mean? A draw on your paycheck? I'm not gonna have a check next month at this point. Okay, well, each district, I can only speak for my office, is what we're doing with our employees. Santa Rosa has to decide what they're gonna do with their employees because they're a legal separate entity. What happens is a district looks at its cash reserve fund and it may choose to draw against that cash reserve fund to give employees some money at hand to stabilize them. Then the following month, you can then draw against your paycheck and that's what we'll do. That's the way we're handling it with Sonoma County Office of Education employees. We made that same offer to districts. We do run all school districts paychecks. So each district, your Santa Rosa City School District, you would need to make those arrangements through your school district and then we can set the system up for your district. And we're getting his name and number right now. We're gonna be following up with him this week. Mr. Superintendent, before you leave, we have another education related question. Are you involved with the JC at all? Only in the fact that we run their payroll system. So is that a question? Okay. I'm gonna get your name and number, ma'am, and then we'll pass it on to the JC tomorrow. Okay. Let me give you just an oversight of schools just while I'm still I'm up here. There were 71,000 students displaced from their educational environment this last week. We had 184 schools in the county. 180 of them were operational. The ones on the coast stayed open all week. We will reopen school and it's a deliberate process for reopening because reopening the school is important because it provides stability and security for children. We realize that value and that is why we are looking at a methodology by which to reopen school. We will reopen school based on the needs of each district. Those in the core of 101 nearest the fire will probably take longer to reopen. Most of those districts are looking at being closed one additional week. The others on the periphery will probably open sooner. Some will call their staff back. We talked about that yesterday because we have to deal with staff issues. We have staff that are hurting. Staff that need to have issues addressed. So we will deal with that mostly each district will do it on Monday or Tuesday and most districts will be operational by Wednesday in this county. That's the timeline. That's the goal. But once again, it's all predicted on the fire. Rincon Valley wasn't a situation we were planning to open on Monday or Tuesday for that district but the situation out there has changed. So we'll have to make it a day-by-day decision. I think I've covered most of what you might want to know but if there are particular questions I'll stay up here. Thank you, Mr. Harington. We're gonna have you hang here. We're gonna go to our next question. This is Mayor Corsi. Yes, earlier in the week I heard on KSRO which has done a fabulous job that some people needed to boil water to drink it. Some people boiling wasn't good enough and I don't know, I've never heard anything more and I'm wondering how you know if your water's good. Where are you? I'm in Montecito Heights. Okay, we have had some problems with water getting pumped up into the higher elevations. I know we had a boiled water notice for the Fountain Grove area. Montecito Heights, I'm not sure specifically about that but you can find out by calling our Information Center at City Hall and it's 543-4511. And if you didn't get that number you can go to srcity.org slash emergency but it's 543-4511. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. I wanna see if we have someone from Cal American Water here. Do we have anyone from Cal American Water? She left, okay. I believe that we are still not drinking the water in Cal Am, is what I believe, correct? Yep, we're not drinking water in Cal Am District which is Larkfield, Wikip, Fulton. So we are not drinking that water. Here we go, ma'am. If you don't mind sustaining your first name. Sheila, I just wanted to get back to the original question the gentleman had about him going on to the FEMA website and he got denied. We never got an answer to that and I would like an answer for that and also I have a lot of family members who lost their homes and they're all gone right now. They're not here to be able to do this. I've been hearing stories about you have to sign up now. If you don't sign up, you can't get help. So what's the timeframe in all this? Because there's a lot of people that are not here to even get this information. You know what I mean? Right, I would say that hopefully people from, and I'm looking for actually maybe- Go to Jody. Jody might have an answer for that. I would say that as far as the gentleman who may have been denied for FEMA, I would encourage anybody who run into trouble on that to actually go to the local assistance center at 457 Mendocino Avenue and actually meet personally with a FEMA representative. It may be that there's something there. There are limitations on the FEMA grants. There are individual grants available, but there are limitations. And so I would encourage anybody who runs into a problem with the website to actually physically go to the local assistance center in Santa Rosa. As far as other information, people are gonna have to either get to it through the internet or physically come back into Santa Rosa. So it's at this point anyway. So I'm gonna let Jody hit that again. I'm Googling right now Disaster Assistance Center FEMA and because there's a phone number, you can call as well. So I'm just trying to find that phone number real quick. It's a FEMA number. So can I meet you after and just bring the phone number to you? All right, we're gonna be going to our next question and I believe I have that phone number and I'll bark it out here in just a bit if you don't mind stating your first name. My name is Kevin and this is a question for Susan Gorin. First off, I'm sorry for your loss. And what I wanna know is what is going to be done to expedite permitting because the vacancy rates in Sonoma County were already close to zero. So what will be done to expedite permitting so that people can stay in trailers on their own property while their house is being rebuilt? Those are excellent questions and thank you all for staying as long as you did through this meeting. I've been scribbling furiously notes for my own situation and communicating that on Facebook, all of the information that we've been given here. My message is first, we have active fires going on. We are still evacuating folks. The Sonoma Valley, my heartbreaks is still in flames and so I'm really focused on that but you will be gratified to know that there is a team of folks at the county already looking at housing options, whether it's temporary housing options, whether it's RVs, whether it's facilitating the siting of accessory dwelling units on the properties, whatever we can think of, we will and make it feasible, we will move forward with this. When a group of us met with the governor and Senator Feinstein ahead of time, we were talking about FEMA trailers. Can we get them in here? Can we cite them? I don't know where we would cite them but they need utility hookups. It's not just sort of placing a trailer somewhere. So we are exploring all options but I think the answer to your question is we are a team, we are working together, we're gonna be working with the city on all of the cleanup that you heard about, all of the great assistance that you can receive at the local assistance center and trying to find great solutions to a housing crisis that has just exploded. So we are here, we're ahead of you and we're all in this together. Thank you so much, Supervisor. We're gonna go to our next question if you could just state your first name. We have about 15 more minutes so I'm gonna ask if we can, for our folks who are gonna be answering, try to be able to be succinct as well. My name is Yoke. Regarding the publicly funded cleanup, do I know do we have to sign up or what? So yeah, that'll be it. So you wonder if you have to sign up for that publicly funded cleanup through CalRecycle? We'll turn that over to you. Thanks, Ken DeRosa with CalRecycle. I'm sorry, do you have to sign up in order for the crew to come and clean your property? That was your question? Yes, yes, there is a process that will likely be managed through the county. It's called a right of entry form that authorizes the contractors to go on to your private property. And that is the critical piece there. That work cannot begin, nor can that work ever be done until you authorize, until you give permission to the crew to come on to your property. We will not clean it without your say so. Hang on one second ma'am, I'm gonna get the microphone. How do we get the phone? Do you have a website that we can get? I believe there was a comment earlier from someone from the county that indicated they are currently drafting that form. There are several things that have to be laid out in it. Again, based on prior experience, Kern County, for example, last year, the Erskine Fire, they had their form and their explanation of how to fill out on their website. So most of that I think would be likely communicated through the website. We need to recognize that not everyone has internet access. So my assumption is that that would likely be through the LAC or some other venue through the county. We're gonna go to our next question. Jody has a little more information, it might be helpful, so. Jody? There is a number you can call. It's 1-800-621-3362. And that will help you to be able to apply online. And that number, or you can call that number between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., seven days a week. That's great. The number is 800-621-3362. And you can do that between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., seven days a week. We're gonna go to our next question. There's also another number, TTY number, for the hearing impaired. 800-462-7585. 800-462-7585, and that's for the hearing impaired. Hi, I'm sorry if this is a repeat question. I was listening intently when you were speaking to the lady from Bicentennial. We lost our house in the Fountain Grove, and we've been trying to get access back in to go through the debris and sift through what we can. And we've been turned away twice, which is understandable with their safety. But we're still not sure the mechanism for getting back in before anyone else can come back in to look through our debris. So your question is, you lost your house in Fountain Grove and you've been turned away a couple of times. Yes. You're unsure about the mechanism for which you'll be informed about how you can get back in? A lot of pictures, memorabilia, things, family items we'd like to try and recover. And we want to go through and sift through. What's gonna end up happening is that you're gonna, the Santa Rosa Police, if you're in the city of Santa Rosa and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, will be giving you a press release out on Twitter, in the press, as well as on Facebook, when individuals can repopulate. What we want to encourage you, though, is before you go back to your house, make sure you get gloves and masks. And you can also, Jody, you have ordered up six 20,000 pairs of gloves and masks. Where will they be located? So when you go into your neighborhood, they're gonna give you gloves and masks, but the Santa Rosa Police and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office will be the ones that will let you know when you're gonna be able to go back into your neighborhood. Sorry, Twitter, what with other mechanisms? Facebook, and they're also gonna be doing a Nixle Alert as well. Yeah, the Nixle Alert, if you type in your zip code to the number, through a text message, to 888-777, you'll get alerts from, that'll go directly. And that's how, that will be one of the primary ways that people will be notified that certain areas are opening up. Just as with the evacuation orders, that'll help with the repopulation. But that's 888-777 with your zip code. And do apologize, I know everyone's been waiting a long time, and thank you for your patience, here we go. My name is Sonia, I'm in the Coffee Park area, and I had more of a suggestion or a request, and I was thinking it might be helpful for us if city staff would meet with, later on when we're ready to rebuild, would meet with smaller groups of neighborhoods to help go over the process. That's a great suggestion. And Mayor Corsi is here, so I'm sure he's gonna take note of that, but I understand, it's a very tight-knit neighborhood, and I think that would be very valuable, thank you, thanks. Yeah, he hears ya. We're gonna finish off on this side, we're gonna go to Ms. Diamond, and then we're gonna come right over. This is Rose. My question, well, all right, we have an epidemic of homeless and drug addicts, and day labor is already, and now we have 50,000 displaced people, and the water, there's no water, and what they need is porta-potties, or something to take showers, because a lot of people are sleeping in cars and tents, because I've been over to parking lots like Safeway, and Finley, and stores, and churches, et cetera, and people are in tents and cars, and where are they gonna go to the bathroom? Because good and well, they'll defecate and urinate out wherever they can, and that is causing human hazard waste, which can cause diseases. So what is being done with that? And this is my second question. This was for FEMA, but I think he left already. There are fully operated camps here in the United States, up to 800 camps, and they're made, or the use of them are for war, or martial law, but I think that they should be used to house some of these people from, you know, this is gonna go on for a long time. It is gonna go on for a long time. Yeah, so, and they're fully operational. Okay. There is no reason for anyone to be sleeping in their car unless they want to, and I've met some people who wanna sleep in their car rather than the shelters, but we have emergency shelters open around the county. There is capacity in those shelters to take more people. So anyone who is displaced that doesn't have a place to go can find that place in one of our emergency shelters. We have more than 20 shelters open now, and there's room in those shelters. As you said, this is gonna be a long time. Right now, we're sheltering people on an emergency basis. We're gonna get to the point where we're doing it on a temporary basis, and then it's gonna take a while to get to a point where we're doing it on a permanent basis, but there's no reason for anyone to not have shelter right now. To find our shelters, at least the ones in the city, srcity.org slash emergency. Thank you, we're gonna go to our next question. My name is Paul, and I'm from Petaluma, and we love Santa Rosa and wanna help you any way we can. So please come down if you need to get any kind of thing, anything at all for security. I have a question for all of us, for Governor Brown and for Senator Harris. And the question is, if you need reliable notification for emergency and disaster, why can't we all retain our landlines that are copper and they are the ones that work in a power outage because the nix-tel alerts and all the other wireless means instantly go down as soon as the fire arrives. Your landlines will continue to work because the power still operates. I have a question for Kamala Harris. Will you help us to report AT&T for price gouging on those landline services that keeps people from keeping that very important emergency service? As a carrier of last resort, AT&T must provide those landlines to everyone who wants them. It is the 175% price increase over five years that pushes people away. And finally, for Governor Brown, you have legislation on your desk right now that if it were in place five years from now and the fire happened five years from now, if SB 649 gets signed by Governor Brown at your doorstep, right at your utility pole in every residential neighborhood, you will have a refrigerator-sized, 35 cubic foot ancillary equipment cabinet which will contain lithium ion batteries as backup and possibly propane and diesel generators. These will explode in any fire. What I'm suggesting as we rebuild, we put all of our infrastructure underground and that way it is safe for everybody. Please, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the comment. We're gonna go to our next question or comment right over here. And again, I wanna apologize that it's taken so long and thank you for your patience and thank you for hanging with us. Yes, thank you. Jorge from Santa Rosa. I have a statement. As we focus on the tremendous needs generated by the current catastrophe we are all part of, we need to look at how we are going to go on from here. These deadly fires are not just weather-related events. They are climate change-related events. When all this is over, we cannot go on with business as usual. It is now a matter of existence for humanity and the planet to make climate change action the main organizing principle of our societies and economies. We must restore the climate to previous more sustainable levels and we must do the adaptation work to protect life, the environment and infrastructure from disasters like these ones to come. To achieve this, we urge city governments, county governments and our state government to officially declare climate change a major disaster now. Thank you very much, thank you for your comment. We have time for two more questions. Two more questions that we're gonna have to conclude. Yes, please. Lilia, I just have a quick question regarding the trees. You know, the trees that are sort of still standing, especially on Coffee Road, the entrance of Coffee Road and Hopper. That's a really open street and therefore how safe are the trees that are still standing in the houses? Well, I would say that that's part of the assessment and that's one of the concerns about safety. Right after the fire on Sunday, Monday, there were trees just randomly falling over that were badly damaged in the fire. So that's one of the reasons we're being very careful about that. They're going in, they're assessing trees and all the any other things that are still standing there to make sure they're safe. Last thing you wanna do is send people in to an area and have a tree fall down on them or a car or something. So everything's being assessed very, very carefully and trees are one of those really important things to look at. Let's go to Ed. Hi, I'm Ed, I lost my house in Coffee Park right on Coffee Lane. I lost my dog on the fire, so I was wondering if there was any, are you running around doing cadaver searches and where would I find my dog or do you throw it in a bag? And then the other question is that it's very important to know this. At the end of the, and this is for the cleanup guy over there. At the end of this month starts our traditional rains. What is going to happen with the toxins from all of these fires going into our drains and going straight to the ocean, all of our rivers and can you take care of that in the municipal water cleanup district? What use is cleaning up something that's gonna be watered down in black silt? First of all, as far as your loss in the lap of your dog, I'm very sorry about that. Any sort of searches would have to go through the Sheriff's Department, so I would recommend that you actually initiate that request through the Sheriff's Department. And so I'm once again, I'm very sorry for your loss and we'll let him address the issues around the runoff because of the weather. Thank you, Jim. Again, Ken DeRosa with CalRecycle. I'm sorry, sir, your first name. Ed. Very thoughtful question, very good question, thank you. So part of the process and what goes on is there is erosion control that goes around the parcels. So we manage for that as part of the cleanup effort because you are entirely correct. The last thing we want is a clean parcel with a lot of loose soil. It sounds like you understand erosion very well and water coming into that and running that into the storm drain into the ocean. So erosion control is an active and engaged part of the cleanup effort that goes on. So we do manage for that very, very closely. We work closely with the water board. We work closely with local environmental health as well. But our crews that are going out there, they're appropriately certified in a variety of ways, but they know to manage for erosion. So thank you for your question. In the real regards to voluntary. Oh, I mean as far as the cleanup effort. So if there's a parcel, if I'm understanding your question, one property owner decides to go with the cleanup, but there's a, yeah, I think that as part of our effort or at least part of the local effort, there will be erosion control that goes on as part of that because it is part of a public health and safety and environmental concern. But to be perfectly honest, as we saw during the valley fire, there are going to be some property owners that do not clean up their property. Correct. You recall that much from Lake County. Yes. Which means the county or the city will need to do an abatement order and it takes time, but there will be some folks that simply do not want to clean up or abandon their property and then it takes time for the city and the county per law to be able to get in there and clean it up for them. And we have to understand that those kinds of situations present a risk not just to the neighbors, but also to the crews that are out there, to everyone. So they need to be managed appropriately and there is an effort to do that. We're going to go to our last question. Hi, I'm Dave and I had a question for homeowners who've lost their homes, should they continue to pay their mortgage and their insurance? Jody, for homeowners who lost their homes, should they continue to pay their mortgage and their insurance? Absolutely, yes, of course you should continue to pay, but I would definitely be calling your insurance company and your mortgage company to let them know that you're a part of this devastating fire. Okay, but definitely, definitely keep paying. Yeah, until, yeah, I personally wouldn't take that chance until you, that would be a great question. There are insurance adjusters, there are insurance adjusters as part outside of the local assistance center along in the Fifth Street area. So all the major insurance carriers are setting up shop in that area. So I would go to them first, but then I would get in touch with your, whoever handles your mortgage and make that inquiry there. So great question, thank you, great question. So ladies and gentlemen, again, we are so sorry that it's taken so long to be able to get through the questions. So we'd like to be able to talk about next steps. Your first step after tonight should be getting to the local assistance center if you have lost your home. It is 5.18, I'm gonna be honest, there is a pretty good crowd at the local assistance center today. They open at nine o'clock tomorrow. I would also try calling the 1-800 number that Assemblymember Wood brought forward. We are gonna be getting back together next week. We're gonna get together next week to be able to start talking about cleanup. God forbid that we continue to have these fires at the end of next week. On behalf of myself and Assemblymember Wood, we have the entire Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, Mayor Corsi who is also here, the Red Cross Office of Emergency Services. We are so sorry. We are gonna come out of this and we're gonna come out of this stronger. We're gonna have some rough days ahead, but we're gonna be able to move forward together. So again, if you have not contacted the local assistance center, please do so either this evening or the first thing tomorrow. And make sure that you're in contact with the Office of Emergency Services after this meeting if you have any additional questions. Mr. Wood, any other items you'd like to be able to follow up with? Senator McGuire who's covered it really, really well. Just wanna add one thing to people who still may be listening out there. My partner here is pretty amazing here, by the way. Anybody who is, if you have homeowners insurance and you're out and even if your home is undamaged, there should be some coverage for you to help you through this time, through temporary housing expenses and things that you will incur by being out of your house. Even in an area that wasn't damaged. So if you were evacuated, you may be able to make a claim with your insurance company to help you with some of the expenses that you've incurred while you've had to be away from your home. So it's important that you reach out to your insurance companies, whether you're a renter or a homeowner, whether your house was destroyed, God forbid, or it wasn't destroyed. There are resources there. You've been paying for these and there are resources you need to take advantage of those. With that. Thank you. I think the last time I was gonna say is going through the Valley Fire and Jody Travesero here was, we were attached at the hip throughout. It's gonna take three months. Do not feel like you're walking around in a haze, being very honest. But it is gonna get better. And we are gonna be stepping forward with this together. We're gonna get back together next week and we're gonna talk about the next steps. The next steps will be all about cleanup. We're gonna walk through them together. We'll have CalRecycle back. We have the absolute professional in the state here, Mr. DuRosa who oversees the entire program for the state to be able to walk through every step of the process. Without further ado, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, we have to still hear for any questions. Thank you.