Emergency alerts

Gov. Jerry Brown considers system upgrades.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown is considering upgrading the state’s emergency alert system in the wake of this fall’s devastating wildfires across Northern California, the governor’s emergency services director told legislators on Monday.

“This is something that we’ve been working on closely,” Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said at an informational legislative hearing about the state’s response to the wildfires.

Emergency alerting systems received widespread complaints for not notifying residents as wildfires ripped through Napa and Sonoma counties in October. The blazes, along with others nearby, left 44 residents dead. Ghilarducci said the fires destroyed 8,900 structures, almost 6,000 of which were primary residences. It was the most homes destroyed in a natural disaster since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Ghilarducci said.

Current emergency alerting systems in the state rely on private cellphone carriers and local governments to decide how they communicate information to residents. Ghilarducci said the proposed state upgrade would focus on providing minimum standards for all systems active in the state.

After his testimony, Ghilarducci told The Times that the plan was still preliminary but that he expects the request would be for “several million dollars.” Brown will unveil his proposed budget next month.

State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), who led the hearing, said the state needed to improve its emergency alerting systems to account for the potential loss of cell towers, which occurred during the wildfires in the fall.

“The most important issue is how do we keep our communities and our people safe,” Jackson said.