communities need more than evacuation plans

Even though the smoke stifles the sky and envelopes the sun, millions of San Francisco Bay Area residents are unprepared for the next hell.

More than half of us are still not registered for official evacuation alerts. We do not practice our emergency exits; maybe there are not any. Cars parked clutter the narrow streets. We are too few to have "take-away" kits. We trust Wi-Fi, cable TV and mobile phones for vital information.

"If you're not careful, you're really screwed," said geographer Gregory Simon of the University of Colorado Denver, who studies the impact of fires in established communities, such as the hills of 39; Oakland. In extreme conditions, he said, "the fire moves several football fields by the minute".

The satellite images reveal the fury of the campfire. Blown by the wind, the flames traveled 12 miles and destroyed half of paradise during its first four hours, even as residents woke up. According to UC Berkeley Landsat's analysis, the flying embers were flying 2.5 miles ahead of the fire. Temperatures exceeded 1,150 degrees, melting the aluminum alloy of the engine blocks of the cars.

City officials ran to follow. The first evacuation orders were issued via the CodeRed "opt in" system of the city. via landlines, mobile phones, SMS, e-mails, Twitter and Facebook and a mobile application. About a quarter of the city's 26,000 residents have registered to receive them. An estimated 6,000 telephone calls on mobile phones during the first 10 minutes of the first evacuation; Of these, 60%, or 3,600, were connected to a person or voicemail, according to OnSolve, the company that operates CodeRed. The number of busy signals was significantly higher, he said.

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But large areas of the city – three evacuation areas on its western edge and one in the center – have never received CodeRed evacuation orders until the day before. 39; an order was issued at the scale of the city in the late morning, much has already been burned, according to Twitter records.

The Butte County Sheriff's Department has decided not to trigger the federal government's wireless emergency alert system, which sends very simple Amber alert warnings to cell phones throughout the county. As a result, television and local radio stations did not learn that Paradise was burning.

Then the communication network failed. Evacuation warnings are largely based on cell sites – and Paradise has quickly lost equipment, the California Public Utilities Commission confirmed on Thursday.

Cursing mute cell phones, Paradise residents, Zachary Byrd and his friends, lost AT & T and Verizon service around 10:15 am the morning of the fire. This information overlaps when evacuation orders were issued between 08:03 and 13:37 depending on the location.

It was only much later that Jani Christine, a resident of Paradise, saw an evacuation notice on Facebook, "a notification that we never had because we had no planes. neither electricity nor cellular service, "she wrote.

Fearful and confused, fleeing drivers quickly hit the road. Some died in dead ends. Others have run out of fuel. At Butte Meadows, stranded evacuees lined up outside an empty gas station, praying for a tanker to reach them before the flames.

"Send a blaster! Why not? Said Byrd, 34, who only learned about the fire when he woke up with his girlfriend. "Why wait?" Then everyone could go out, it would have saved lives.

Paradise was prepared at risk well before the camp's fire. The leaders of the city had created aNo evacuation plan after the 2008 fires in Humboldt and Lightning forced the evacuation of one-third of its residents.

But with concern, city council candidate Julian Martinez warned at an election forum in September that the plan might not work.

"I think we are ready for minor forest fire-related disasters – but in the worst case, I do not think we are," he said. "The proliferation that reigns inside this city is dangerous … We have a lot of seniors in this city, a lot of people who do not have cars or even worse cars that are not reliable you make people fall into emergency situations.

Martinez warned: "I think we may be prepared for what the fires looked like 10 years ago, but I do not think we're ready for this season or next season."

Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Disaster Preparedness Center at Columbia University, agrees. "It is really very difficult to develop a system that can exceed the speed and ferocity of this fire," he said.

Like Paradise, 187 other Californian communities have been classified as "very high risk" by Cal Fire, particularly in the Santa Cruz, East Bay Hills, Diablo Range, and Marin neighborhoods. Hills. More and more places are less threatened, but still very vulnerable, with a landscape of grasses, shrubs and paradise-like forests littered with dead and dead woody debris, said Stanford historian Richard White.

To alert residents, California counties have created emergency notification systems. These alerts provide detailed information and are geographically targeted, connecting with fixed lines and mobile phones and emails submitted voluntarily.

However, the compliance rate was poor, ranging from 10 percent of San Mateo County and Contra Costa County residents to 24 percent of Alameda and Santa Clara Counties and 46 percent of Santa Cruz County.

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The federal Amber alert system affects everyone in the county and attracts a lot more attention. The Los Angeles Times reported that a city emergency officer had said the county had not used the alert because they initially wanted to stagger evacuations by neighborhood.

But it only takes one choke throttle – a recessed cable, a burnt electric pole or a parked car – to create a "choke point" on an entire road, blocking transit and forcing people to flee on foot, said Simon.

And despite the best intentions, the exit routes are not always well maintained. Prohibited parking areas on narrow, winding roads are designed to allow for quick escape into places such as Berkeley Hills and the Emerald Hills of the peninsula. However, an overview of Google Maps shows how rarely they are applied. Some subdivisions, such as Atherton's, Lindenwood, have only two-sided exits, not four.

Houses dot the narrow, winding streets of the Oakland Hills, where the 1991 fire killed 25 people who could not escape erratic and erratic flames. In Yorba Linda, Orange County, supervisors have just approved Esperanza Hills, a 340-million-dollar multi-million dollar development project on a closed cul de sac where 381 homes were burned only 10 years ago.

The picturesque Laguna Beach has only three routes to carry traffic out of the city – and it is lined with utilities on wooden poles. Residents have just defeated an increase in sales tax that would have buried the cables of the road.

Watching Paradise Burn: "This is our community's nightmare for my life," said Bob Whalen, Laguna Beach Board Member.

Columbia Redlener said it was time to re-evaluate our approach to fire safety. He recommends audible alarms telling us that we are in danger, followed by texts, emails or other more detailed messages telling us what to do.

"If I thought I would see an orange light, I would not go on Twitter to check my computer," said Jane Mobley, co-author of an article on national disaster response led by the National Academies of Sciences. "Here in Kansas, when you hear sirens, you go to the shelter."

Menlo Park, whose fire chief Harold Schapelhouman is a leader in disaster preparedness, retains his old-fashioned siren – but has also just purchased a $ 150,000 mobile long-range acoustic device capable of transmitting voice messages at 150 deafening decibels, as loud as an airplane catch. -off, more than a mile away.

According to experts, cities can do more to keep the streets clear and facilitate evacuations, but residents must be prepared to save themselves. Everyone has the basic "take-away" essentials and keeps the fuel tanks half full.