Town Council set to discuss after action report

The Paradise Town Council will meet Tuesday night in the first meeting of the new year and will decide whether to accept the Camp Fire after-action report and authorize town staff to implement the plan.

The report has been in works since Oct. 22, 2019 when the Town Council accepted a charitable donation from Direct Relief of almost $50,000, to fund an After Action Report by Constant Associates, a thirdparty emergency management and public health preparedness consulting firm. The firm was also commissioned to prepare a similar report for Butte County.

According to the agenda, the areas of particular focus for the firm were: Notification, Alert, and Warning; the Evacuation; Emergency Operations Center; Interagency Coordination; Public Information; Continuity of Government.

The report focused on a defined time frame and wanted to capture the best practices and lessons learned from Paradise that were exhibited during the Camp Fire response and recovery efforts beginning November 8, 2018 and ending December 15, 2018.

The report notes the strengths exhibited during the Town’s Camp Fire response and its areas for improvement.

According to the agenda the strengths are:

• Town staff, CAL FIRE, and Paradise Police Department remained adaptable to a rapidly evolving incident. Town staff and Paradise Police Department continuously found ways to support the life-saving mission. Due to the progression of the fire within Paradise, CAL FIRE transitioned from fire-fighting to life- saving, sheltering residents in place during the evacuation with support from Paradise Police Department.

• The entire community displayed an extraordinary capacity for heroism and came together to help the Town in various avenues, from evacuation to recovery.

• Prior knowledge and socialization of the Town of Paradise Evacuation Plan proved helpful during evacuation, as the public was familiar with evacuation procedures such as contraflow.

• Emergency Operations Center (EOC) training and experience in multiple previous disaster scenarios enabled staff to rapidly transition into emergency response and recovery roles.

• The Town EOC successfully relocated to the alternate EOC in Chico as a result of pre- established relationships and agreements with the City of Chico.

• The Town’s relationships with neighboring jurisdictions and other related response organizations allowed for the implementation of best practices established through responses to previous disasters, such as search and rescue and missing persons operations, as well as access to resources, which greatly expanded the Town’s overall capability.

Area for improvement

The following were identified as the most notable areas for improvement exhibited during the Town of Paradise Camp Fire response.

• Due to the rapidly changing incident which caused the failure of communications systems, there was a lack of coordination between responding agencies concerning the mass notification process during the Camp Fire. This resulted in delayed or absent emergency notifications.

• Due to the presence of ember-ignited spot fires throughout the Town and communications failures, it was difficult to maintain situational awareness between agencies and departments during evacuation and other immediate response operations.

• There was insufficient information flow between the field and Town EOC Operations on Nov. 8 due to the rapid loss of communication infrastructure, the fast pace of the incident, and the evacuation of the Town EOC to the alternate EOC in the City of Chico.

• Addressing public information needs throughout the Camp Fire was a challenge due to the continuously changing nature of the incident and an insufficient number of staff trained as Public Information Officers (PIOs).

• There were challenges associated with staffing response roles, as many of the Town staff were adversely impacted by the disaster themselves.

• The current EOC does not have sufficient space or communications infrastructure to support a large, catastrophic emergency response.

Sewer update

The town is also going to ask the council to approve an agreement with the city of Chico to facilitate work in grant funded payments relating to the city’s ability and needs to accept a direct connection from Town of Paradise to Chico’s wastewater site.

The town will also have to select two council members to be on Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control board’s committee that participates in the Paradise Sewer Project Development.

Within the same vote the town is going to ask the council to sign a sponsorship letter for a bill by

Assemblyman James Gallagher to allow for Design Build Contracting for the sewer project.

Once the town has completed its action item list, it will have two agenda items to discuss.

The first item is a proposal by Steve Culleton to provide free burn permits for Town residents and consider changing the burn permit from the calendar year to a fiscal year. Currently burn permits run from July to June, but instead of doing it that way, Culleton suggests a January to December permit calendar

He says doing it that way means residents only have to get one permit per calendar year instead of two per calendar year.

After that the council will discuss options for the green waste facility and consider bringing back and extending the urgency ordinance to allow green waste processing from both private and state projects within the town limits.