3 months later: The lessons learned Officials prepare after-action reports
Exactly three months ago, area residents were told to evacuate their homes.
Trouble had been developing at the Oroville Dam and the main spillway had been shut down; water started flowing over the emergency spillway and the hillside below it started disintegrating at an alarming rate. Late afternoon on Feb. 12, evacuation orders were issued.
By most people’s accounts, it didn’t go well. Thousands of cars hit the highways at the same time and it took hours to go a few miles. There were other glitches, too, and emergency operations crews swore they’d learn and develop better plans.
Representatives from both sides of the river say they’ve spent the last few months collecting accounts of the evacuation from various agencies and working on reports.
Yuba County The county had an after-action meeting on April 10, said communications and legislative affairs coordinator Russ Brown. A report was delayed, Brown said, because the county is still working on after-action reports from the January storms which preceded the spillway crisis.
“There have been a lot of moving parts, beginning in January through the evacautions in February and now,” Brown said.
But what is clear is that not much will
change in the county’s evacuation plan.
“As much as people were frustrated by the time it took to evacuate, things still went very well from our perspective,” Brown said. “People got out safely.”
Scott Bryan, emergency operations manager, said the only real issue with the recent evacuation was the lack of communication from those at the Department of Water Resources.
“The issues we had with our evacuation plan were due to the no-notice from DWR, and that’s what created gridlock, choke points, bottlenecking and people unable to get out of the area quickly,” Bryan said. “We did not find anything that needed to be changed in our evacuation plan.”
What will be taken into consideration, Bryan said, is the possibility of developing zones based on the possibility of an Oroville Dam spillway failure. It would outline which zones would be notified in what order, so as to evacuate the area in a more organized manner. That idea will be discussed in a future meeting, Bryan said.
He also said that while the county used social media effectively during the evacuation, officials will also need to take into consideration possible negative effects.
“We don’t want to make a rash decision,” Bryan said. “We want to get all the players in the room and hash out what it would look like and whether it would be beneficial to the community as a whole.”
Marysville City Manager Walter Munchheimer said the city’s afteraction report has been completed and turned over to the county to be integrated into its plan.
“We’re in the process of making some revisions to our own multi-hazard plan,” Munchheimer said Thursday. “That will take another several months.”
Topics included in that plan include communication between and among various agencies, public communication and levee patrols.
Sutter County Public information officer Chuck Smith said the county had a series of meetings with employees and non-county partners, and is currently writing its after-action report. The report will be used to update the emergency operations plan.
“We will be sitting down with Yuba City and the Highway Patrol to augment the maps Yuba City created for evacuation routes specific to an emergency at Oroville Dam,” Smith wrote in an email. “One of the items that will be identified in our after action report is additional emergency preparedness awareness in an effort to improve community-wide preparedness.”
Yuba City Public affairs official Darin Gale said city staff has been analyzing improvements since the day following the evacuation. The city’s after-action report is in draft form and will be presented to the City Council on Tuesday.
“One of the key things in there is the city has provided evacuation routes based upon another emergency of the Oroville Spillway,” Gale said.
Gale also highlighted Tuesday’s community meeting the city hosted with a panel of DWR officials.
“We’ve been asking for meetings with DWR,” Gale said. “The city encouraged DWR to be open and transparent. One example was this closed door meeting, and the city ensured that the Appeal-Democrat was able to participate.” (The elected officials’ briefing held prior to the community Q-and-A was advertised by the city as being public, but a DWR official told an Appeal-Democrat reporter that it was not. Three city council members and three supervisors left the room so as to not violate the Brown Act, though eventually the reporter was admitted.)
Gale also pointed out that the city submitted a memo of nine questions to DWR to be answered in a timely manner. He said he asked that they be answered by the end of this week and as of Thursday, they had not.
“We provided those nine questions ... we still don’t have a date to take a tour of the (Oroville) facility,” Gale said. “It’s been three months.”
That frustration with DWR’s communication was a common theme in the community meeting, and highlighted in interviews with city and county officials.
“The first item of business was not completing an afteraction report. The first item of business was implementing strategies to ensure if we ever have to evacuate again, we can as quickly and orderly as possible,” Gale said. “It just means that we have to prepare that if we think there are any issues ... we will put into action our internal efforts to make sure we’re prepared and ready.”
As outlined in its after-action report, challenges that were identified include:
Receiving timely and accurate information from DWR regarding the status of the emergency.
Communication and coordination between local government agencies on evacuation procedures and trigger points.
Timely notification of emergency status and actions to the public.
Coordinating emergency public information releases.
Traffic caused by rapid evacuation.