The Sad State of California Wildfire Evacuation Plans

Bloomberg News published an article that digs deep into the state of California's evacuation plans. Unfortunately, the conclusion is troubling. A number of officials say plans are not made public for security reasons, others say planning for an unpredictable wildfire is fruitless and that plans need to be made at the time of the fire. Below are a list of some of the points and some of the excerpts from the article. The full article is here.

• Paradise had some of the strongest evacuation plans in the state.
  
• USA Today Network California requested evacuation plans from 27 of the most at-risk communities; only 22% had robust plans that were available to the public.
  
• "'State law doesn't require evacuation plans. City and county authorities can decide whether to have one,' said Mark Pazin, Chief of Law Enforcement for the California Office of Emergency Services. 'Nothing is mandated, but it's highly advisable, given the drama we've seen up and down the state,' Pazin said."
  
• Some officials find wildfires too unpredictable to plan for. Based on an interview with Paul Leventhal, Assistant Fire Marshall for Santa Rosa, the article says, "Evacuation plans may be helpful in communities with few roads in and out. But in communities like Santa Rosa, where there are more options, he believes they aren't needed."
  
• When USA Today Network California reporters contacted community leaders and emergency management from around the state, some claimed they do have plans but refused to make them available.
  
• Los Angeles County - "Emily Montanez, a senior program manager with the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, said the evacuation report is not available to the public because it contains sensitive information about the sheriff's office main station and substations. Los Angeles County later released a copy of the evacuation plan after it received a public records request for the document."
  
• San Bernardino County - "In San Bernardino County, the sheriff's and fire departments have developed evacuation plans, but ‘the information is not public record because of the possibility of someone using that information to hamper evacuations during an emergency,’ said Scott Vanhorne, a spokesman for a county supervisor. While the documents referred to the roles and responsibilities of various agencies during emergency evacuations, they did not include a separate appendix on evacuations. The county also did not provide the evacuation plan for the communities of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline and Running Springs — three communities where at least 95% of residents live in very high hazard areas for wildfires."
  
• El Dorado County - "El Dorado County officials also initially refused to release information about evacuation plans that would cover Pollock Pines, one of the 15 largest communities in the state where more than 95% of residents live in a very high hazard zone for wildfire. iIn response to a Public Records Act request, the county provided one page from its emergency operations plan that refers to evacuations. Three paragraphs on that page were blacked out."
  
• Ventura County - "Kevin McGowan, assistant director of emergency services for Ventura County, said fires are too unpredictable to plan for evacuations: You don't know where they will start and you don't know where they'll go. 'Our concern with that pre-planned stuff is that it doesn't lend itself to that dynamic decision-making process,' McGowan said.”
  
• San Diego County - "One of the more ‘impressive’ evacuation plans, according to researcher Cova, was developed by San Diego County and is included as a 76-page appendix to its emergency operations plan. The county's evacuation plan was born out of the lessons learned from evacuating New Orleans residents during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as well as hurricanes Irma and Harvey in 2017."
  

There are other citations from other counties and towns in the article. The best next step would be to check with your local authorities and find out what the plan is, if it's public, and how best to be informed of the evacuation route during an emergency.