At the Fire and Earthquake Safety Expo on Sunday May 1st in Cloverdale, I was able to meet people who work to prepare for and respond to emergencies in Sonoma County. It was a good way to put faces to what seems like a confusing cluster of acronyms for mutual aid organizations serving Sonoma County as well as Sebastopol.
COPE
“Some organizations are about what you can do before a disaster happens,” said Priscilla Abercrombie of COPE Northern Sonoma County. “There’s another group of organizations that focus on what happens once a disaster occurs — the response during the event,” she explained.
While various government agencies are involved in emergency preparedness and response, Priscilla believes that grassroots efforts play an important role. COPE stands for Citizens Organized to Prepare for Emergencies and it started first as a neighborhood organizing project in Oakmont with support from the Santa Rosa Fire Department. Now there are four other COPE groups in Sonoma County. Priscilla, who lives on Fitch Mountain in Healdsburg, wanted to organize her community and heard of the COPE model and adopted it. “We all learned from the wildfires,” said Priscilla. COPE Northern Sonoma County is its own 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
“We started by asking people what do they care about most during an emergency,” she said. A grandmother, for example, worries most about the safety of her grandkids. Many people told her they wished they knew their neighbors better. “There might be a person in the neighborhood who is elderly and moves only with a walker or another person without a car,” she added. In the event of an evacuation, it helps to know who those people are. “You want to know who will need help and how to help them,” said Priscilla.
MYN
“Neighbors helping neighbors” is the tagline of Sebastopol Ready (SebastopolReady.org) website. “The City of Sebastopol saw that they needed to do something at the local level in 2018 to prepare for emergencies in the future,” said Skip Jirrels, who was hired then as Public Safety Outreach Coordinator for the City of Sebastopol and who works through the Sebastopol Fire Department.
Sebastopol’s MYN project, which stands for “Map Your Neighborhood,” grew out of a project piloted in Washington State. MYN started in Sebastopol in 2010 as a replacement for Sebastopol CERT (see below) but it was given a higher priority in 2018. The goal of MYN is to develop a network of neighborhoods throughout the 95472 area code that follow the program’s 9 Steps. In each neighborhood, people agree upon a neighborhood gathering site in case of an emergency. They organize valuable information such as which neighbors may have skills or tools that would be valuable to share.
There are currently 44 MYN groups in the city of Sebastopol and surrounding areas. The MYN Leader Council meets via Zoom each month and there are other scheduled meetings on the group’s calendar.
SNCU
The purpose of the SNCU (Sebastopol Neighborhood Communications Unit) program is to build and maintain a radio communications network that can be used to exchange information across neighborhoods and with the Fire Department in an emergency. If electricity or cell towers are down, normally reliable communications infrastructure would be unavailable. SNCU is training community members in the protocols to use radios to relay information from neighborhoods and managing three local communication hubs, which are connected to the Fire Department.
Stan Green is the volunteer lead of SNCU. “We’re here to look after each other,” he said, wearing a red cap in the Sebastopol Ready booth at the Expo. Stan organizes monthly radio check-ins and provides training for operators and scribes who log the radio transmissions.
All but the geeky can ignore the details on radios. SCNU relies on different types of radios with different ranges. Inexpensive walkie-talkies (FRS for Family Radio Service) have the least range, but they can connect one household to another. FRS signals can be picked up by GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service, licensed by the FCC) radios, which have a greater range. A GMRS radio operator can in turn connect to other GMRS operators in neighborhoods or to the Fire Department. There is also Ham Radio that is able to relay information over greater distances.
This adhoc communications network can pass requests and responses back and forth. Also, even when phone service is working, 911 can become overloaded in an emergency. This problem was highlighted in a Facebook post from the Sebastopol Police Department on October 21, 2021 and reported on by Laura Hagar-Rush. In a half-joking but informative manner, the Police Department described the many calls that come to 911 with people asking for help and information on topics that the Police or Fire Departments can’t respond to. Questions such as asking when the power will come back on or who can fix a rain gutter are some examples. The reality is that during an emergency people have a lot of questions and they don’t know whom to call.
This is also where neighbors can help each other. A person calling about their power outage might have a concern about their medication, which requires refrigeration. SNCU might put out a request looking for a neighbor with a generator who might be able to help.
CERT
One other important group is CERT — Community Emergency Response Teams, which are supported by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. CERT volunteers have gone through training in how to respond to an emergency, and they are organized through local fire departments. The primary responsibility is to support first responders, such as the local Fire Department.
Stan Green and others such as Marian McDonald got involved in SNCU because they had taken CERT training classes in Sebastopol. CERT volunteers proudly wore their badges at the Expo. “CERTs are the only ones formally trained to respond in an emergency and assist first responders,” explained Stan.
The MYN network replaced the CERT Sebastopol, as mentioned above. The Sebastopol Fire Department does not currently support the CERT program, although it once did, but then phased out the program, in part due to lack of interest.
I talked to Geoff Peters who is the CERT Program Manager for Northern Sonoma County and asked him why Sebastopol was not in the CERT program. Geoff explained that some fire departments have stopped being part of CERT largely because of concerns over potential liability. (If something happened to a CERT volunteer during an emergency or a CERT volunteer did something inappropriate, the Fire Department or City could get sued.) “FEMA has given Sonoma County a $500K grant to support CERT programs,” said Geoff. “The program might be able to provide insurance for Fire Departments so that they don’t have to worry about liability.” He believed that the grant would encourage all Fire Departments to offer CERT training and support.
Outreach
Community outreach was certainly the purpose behind the “Fire and Earthquake Safety Expo.” However, getting people involved remains a challenge, as the modest turnout at the Expo demonstrated. Nonetheless, the EXPO made it clear that there are a small group of committed people, most of them volunteers, who are ready and doing the work, realizing how much it can benefit many others. They welcome more people to join them.
Both MYN and COPE want to improve outreach to the Spanish-speaking community, which might include some name changes to the organizations. Priscilla said that COPE will replace “Citizens” with “Communities” to be more inclusive. Skip had heard that “neighborhood” didn’t have such a positive connotation in the LatinX community. MYN has partnered with the Gravenstein Health Action Coalition to reach out through their network.
Priscilla Abercrombie emphasized that “local grassroots efforts are more sustainable in the long run,” adding that they will always be needed. Individuals who are part of neighborhood networks will be better prepared to care for themselves, their family and their community in an emergency.
Other information
The 2020-2021 Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury’s Report on “Emergency Alerts and Communications: Toward a Culture of Preparedness” provides a lot more detail on what Sonoma County agencies have been doing as a result of wildfires of 2015-2020.
SoCoEmergency.org is the County of Sonoma’s website for Emergency Readiness, Response and Recovery.