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  Warning System Broken but Sheriff's Office Says It's Our Fault for Not Understanding the System
August 10, 2012
 

Just about everyone agrees that the Community Warning System is dysfunctional – except for the people responsible for it who continue to make excuses and defend it. In response to a complaint from a Richmond resident  who did not hear a siren, Katherine Hern, Manager, Community Warning System, responded. Instead of blaming the system, Ms. Hern blamed to populace for not understanding the full capabilities of the system: “The biggest improvement to our current system, which still stands as one of the most advanced in the nation, would simply be for more public awareness of its full capabilities.” 

If our system is one of the most advanced in the nation, I fear for the rest of the country.

The full text of Ms. Hern’s response is as follows:

First let me thank you for informing us of your situation during the unfortunate incident on Monday night.  We have received much of the same feedback, but each case helps build a wealth of information of the type that we use towards the continual improvement and effectiveness of our system.

As to the specifics of why you did not receive a telephone call during the incident, your location is 12 blocks east of the area that was determined to be in need of a full shelter in place.  After Health Services determined the extent of the impacted area, they determined that the initial shelter in place zones did not need to be expanded and instead issued a "Health Advisory" to the surrounding areas.  This is a condition that does not require a shelter in place but residents should be aware of the possibilities of eye, nose, or throat irritation.  At that point, calls were still in progress for the shelter in place and since media was covering the incident, TV and radio was at that point the most effective method to send the information out.

Please let me clarify that the Community Warning System is much more than just a telephone notification system, but rather one that sets in motion a multitude of alerting methods.   From the second the refinery "pushes the button", it is the CWS that first notifies Law, Fire, and Government agencies, traditional and social media, sounds sirens, and starts land line and cell phone calls.  I am glad to hear that you received notification from your Yahoo group and Bloomberg.  We absolutely rely on that kind of "force multiplier" to help get the information out.  It was likely triggered through our automatic social media posts or traditional media notifications.  We do need to improve upon ways to work with the media to continue reliable coverage of an incident after we first notify them through the system.

So as you can see, there are numerous ways to receive information through the CWS and we urge residents to not rely solely on the one method of antiquated land lines.  There is no expected capacity improvement in the foreseeable future of the wireline telephone networks.  We have continued through the years to integrate communication trends into our system beyond that of just TV, radio and phones.  Please believe my assurance that we work hard every day with our stakeholders and primary vendor for constant evolution and improvement and do not just wait until something happens to do so. 

The biggest improvement to our current system, which still stands as one of the most advanced in the nation, would simply be for more public awareness of its full capabilities.  We urge residents to continue to rely on each other, TV and radio, and now social media as well.  Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, PLEASE register your cell phones.  And we continue to urge media to work with us, not against us, to get the most accurate information out as possible during and after an incident.  They will have your attention much longer and in a more effective capacity than any other component of the CWS.

Again, I sincerely thank you for voicing your concerns and raising these issues.  I hope I have answered them somewhat but please do not hesitate to give me a call and we can discuss further.  As a matter of fact, I see your association with Laney College and we are always on the lookout for public outreach opportunities for our staff to attend and help spread the word about how to be involved with the CWS.  If this is something you would be interested in, again, give me a call.

Sincerely,
  
Katherine Hern
Manager, Community Warning System

Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office
Emergency Services Division
50 Glacier Drive
Martinez, CA 94553
925-313-9603

Register your cell phones at www.cococws.us

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So, what we now know is that officials didn’t really mean for everyone in West County to shelter in place, and if you didn’t get a phone call, you should have known that in spite of sirens blaring every half hour until midnight and TV stations urging you to shelter in place, or even evacuate, you only needed to be aware of a “health advisory.”

They say the first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem, and its looks like the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office hasn’t taken that step yet.

Contra Costa Times editorial: Time to finally fix county's emergency warning system

Editorial Contra Costa Times
Posted:   08/08/2012 12:40:19 PM PDT
Updated:   08/08/2012 07:38:11 PM PDT

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http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site571/2012/0808/20120808_013728_ewct0808firefolo94_VIEWER.jpg
Michael Beer, of Richmond, wears a mask during a Chevron town hall meeting at the Richmond...
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So here we are: Another emergency situation. Another failure of Contra Costa's community warning system. Another covey of concerned officials scurrying to gather information to explain exactly why to an even larger group of angry residents. Again.
Déjà vu, anyone?
It is certainly an all-too-familiar scene to residents of Contra Costa County.
The latest transgression was the Level 3, the most dangerous, explosion and fire Monday night at the Chevron refinery in Richmond.
The blaze, which began shortly after 6 p.m. at the refinery's No. 4 diesel crude processing unit, spewed tons of pollutant-laced black smoke into the air for several hours. It sent hundreds of people to local emergency rooms complaining of difficulty breathing and other health effects.
Thankfully, no one was killed or gravely injured in the incident.
Contra Costa is home to four oil refineries, which collectively produce thousands of jobs, both directly and indirectly, not to mention a great deal of tax revenue. But, by their very nature, oil refineries also come with some inherent and significant risk. In fact, Contra Costa produces more hazardous material per capita and per square mile than any other county in the state.
It is against that landscape that the county saw the need to create a community warning system and to pass its historic industrial safety ordinance. The ordinance, which was passed 10 years ago, for the most part has been a success. The community warning system, which has been around much longer, has not.
The system, which is funded by industry and run by the county, has either flunked or received low marks on nearly every real-life emergency it has encountered.
In each of those cases, there has been a kerfuffle, followed by an investigation, followed by a promise that things are going to be different in the future. Unfortunately, that has yet to be so. If the crowd that packed the Richmond Memorial Auditorium on Tuesday night is any indication, local residents are fed up with that, um, underperformance.
It is an ironic reminder that here in the epicenter of American computer technology -- and despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars -- we seem unable to devise and implement a computer system to effectively run our courts, our Department of Motor Vehicles or one to effectively warn the people paying for these systems of an imminent danger.
Contra Costa Supervisor John Gioia, who lives in Richmond, says the biggest problem is the capacity of the call system. He has asked for a full accounting from the county Office of Emergency Services.
Residents, he says, reported receiving calls during the first round of notification from 6:45 to 8:30 p.m. -- a nearly two-hour time period. That's simply unacceptable.
At the same time, we do not believe it is productive to point fingers and rave about inefficiency. Instead, we would encourage a serious community-based discussion with substantial input from industry that calmly analyzes what went wrong. For example, if the capacity is inadequate, industry must provide sufficient funding to upgrade it.
But the important thing here is that this must be a public, community-based effort that must not be delayed. The time to act is now.

Pinole Patch

Public Warning System Criticized After Chevron Fire

Local residents and a Richmond City Councilman called the county's community warning system dysfunctional, while officials in charge of the system say they're investigating the reasons for long delays and other problems in notifying the public.

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Facing strong criticisms, county officials said they do not know why the Contra Costa County community warning system took up to three hours to call local residents with a shelter-in-place warning after Monday's Chevron refinery fire began spewing a large plume over many neighborhoods.
During Tuesday’s town hall meeting—initiated by Chevron to address community concerns in the wake of the five-hour fire that has caused more than 1,700 people to go to local hospitals with respiratory and other complaints—many members of the public criticized the warning system as slow and ineffective.
Richmond City Councilman Tom Butt echoed those criticisms in an email on Tuesday, in which he compared Monday’s incident to the 2007 Chevron refinery fire, when he and many other residents expressed outrage that the warning system did not start its phone calls until more than an hour after the fire began.
“This is reminiscent of the confusion that reigned during the 2007 fire at Chevron," he said in the email. "All those problems were supposed to have been fixed, but they persist."
Katherine Hern, manager of the county’s community warning system, said approximately 20,000 calls—to a combination of landlines and cellphones—were made on Monday night to warn citizens to shelter in place in Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo.
Though the system began making calls shortly after the fire started at 6:30 p.m., it was not until three hours later that the last of the 20,000 calls was finished.
“That’s a problem which we’re going to have to look into—why is the phone system so slow?” said Dr. Wendel Brunner, Director of Public Health for Contra Costa Health Services.
Hern explained in an interview on Wednesday that the community warning system uses an independent vendor, CityWatch, to make the automated phone calls.
She said she is not sure what caused the delay, and that the county will work with CityWatch to examine the data from Monday to determine the cause.
One possible reason, Hern said, is that the phone line network was overloaded with all the calls, so that even if CityWatch had the ability to make the calls faster, the existing infrastructure would not allow for it.
Hern, who was part of the panel at Tuesday’s meeting, emphasized that the issues with the phone calls demonstrate why the county relies on more than just one method to alert residents to an emergency.
Sirens, which sound every half hour, social media and press releases are all additional ways the county spreads emergency information, she said.
But Some Richmond residents who spoke on Tuesday said they never received any kind of warning from the county about the fire or the shelter-in-place order. Instead, they heard the news from concerned relatives or friends.
One woman in the audience of more than 500 people shouted, “I got no phone call, I got no siren, I got no answers.”
Hern stressed that part of the responsibility falls on residents to make an effort to understand how they can receive alerts and how emergency information is disseminated.
“No matter how well the system is designed or tested or operated on a daily basis, it is only as effective as what you understand as how it’s supposed to work or not work,” Hern told the audience at the meeting.
This was met with some shouts and boos from audience members who said it was the county’s job to make sure everyone is alerted to an emergency.
A dysfunctional system
Richmond City Councilman Tom Butt shared residents’ frustration with the community warning system.
“The Community Warning System once again failed to function adequately,” he wrote to constituents and others on his email list.
Butt described his experience Monday night at his Point Richmond home. He said received a call on his cell phone at 6:46 p.m., but didn’t receive a call on his home phone until 9:30 p.m.
He added that he continued getting messages on both phones “every hour after that, waking me up,” until the all clear at 12:50 a.m.
In his email, Butt included excerpts from emails he said he received from others. Butt said these emails “testify to the slow warning, misinformation, lack of information and general confusion caused by a dysfunctional warning system.”
The email excerpts in Butt’s message indicated that some of people received emergency calls early, some received them late, and some received calls that stopped when the message was only partway done.
Who received phone calls?
Several non-Richmond residents said they received calls from the community warning system on Monday.
El Cerrito resident Denise Sangster said she got a call at about 6:40 p.m. that gave the shelter-in-place warning. Sangster, who had been about to walk her dogs, said she closed her doors and windows, and turned on the news to learn more.
Sangster said that after the 2007 refinery fire, she registered both her cell phone and house phone on the community warning system website .
On Wednesday, Hern explained that Sangster and other non-Richmond residents had received calls because they had registered their numbers with the system under certain ZIP codes.
When a resident registers a phone number with the community warning system, they can select one or more ZIP codes to associate the number with.
Hern said that when an emergency at the refinery happens, the community warning system is preprogrammed to call all landlines in a specific area. This area is predetermined by vicinity to the refinery and historical experience.
The majority of the 20,000 calls made on Monday went to landlines in that area, Hern said. The remainder of the calls went to numbers that residents had registered, which were associated with ZIP codes in proximity with that area.
“There is a little bit more spillover with the ZIP codes,” she said. “So it’s very possible for someone to get it on their cell phone who may not be immediately affected.”
Areas affected by the smoke
Many Richmond residents at Tuesday’s meeting said they suffered respiratory irritation, and county officials said the smoke also moved out over other cities as well.
“It did land other places,” said Randy Sawyer of Contra Costa Health Services after the meeting. “We know it hit Martinez, we know people in the Oakland Hills had it, and El Cerrito was complaining about it.”
But areas other than Richmond, North Richmond, and San Pablo did not have shelter-in-place orders. Health advisories were issued for some areas, including El Cerrito and the North Oakland Hills, suggesting that residents stay indoors if they had preexisting respiratory problems or felt uncomfortable.
“You have to make some kinds of judgment calls,” said Brunner. “The next day, once you have all of the data, it’s easier to figure out where it should have been done. But we try to be conservative.”
Brunner said that after warning system made the first 20,000 calls, the county could have called more residents. But because the first set of calls took almost three hours, he said it did not make sense to continue calls at that rate.
Some residents in El Cerrito and Kensington who did not receive phone calls still found out about the emergency from neighbors or the Kensington Police Department.
Sangster said after she received the call, she sent out a message to the almost 800 people on the Arlington Neighbors email list to inform people.
Richmond residents at Tuesday’s meeting shared similar stories of spreading the word, and Hern said neighborly actions like that are necessary to the success of the warning system.
Improvements in the future
Hern said her job is to be working every day to improve the community warning system, and events like those on Monday help bring to light specific problems in the system.
In addition to looking into the reason for the delay in phone calls, Hern said the county will consider altering the automated message to better indicate what areas have shelter-in-place orders. She also said improvements to the website are ongoing.
Sangster suggested changing the caller ID of the alert system. Currently, most people’s phones will display calls from the warning system as having a number of all zeros.
Hern said attaching a real number to the call system would inevitably lead to some people calling it back, which would create a problem because there is no staff to handle that influx of calls.
The caller ID of all zeros was selected so that it would grab people’s attention, she said, and so that it could be distinguished from a 1-800 telemarketer number.
“It’s not ideal, but it’s the best thing we can do at the moment without a staffed call center,” she said.
To prepare for future emergencies, the best thing for people to do, Hern said, is to sign up their cell phones on the community warning system website , and familiarize themselves with the methods for obtaining emergency information.
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See more of Patch's Chevron fire coverage:

Related Topics: Chevron Refinery Fire, chevron fire, and refinery fire

 

 

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