

She estimates that about 10% of Sonoma County's workforce, or about 400 people, are working around the clock on the fire.

For many survivors, the most glaring problem that night in October 2017 was the lack of communication about when to evacuate and where to go. Then, it took hours for Sonoma County officials to open the emergency center, which can send out emergency alerts.

While many officials defended their decisions, saying the fire was moving too fast to get everyone out of harm’s way, KQED found significant delays between the time that first responders recognized the need to warn residents and when officials actually sent out those alerts.

This time, Gorin says, the county took that lesson to heart.

“We did not want to repeat that experience. So they evacuated large numbers of the population in Sonoma County early,” she said.

So far, almost 200,000 people have been asked to evacuate in Sonoma County. During the height of the Tubbs Fire only about 100,000 people were evacuated.

New Ways of Communicating During Emergencies

County officials were also criticized in 2017 for not notifying enough people quickly enough and for relying on opt-in systems many residents were unaware even existed.

Now, more people have signed up for the alerts and the county is experimenting with contacting people directly on their cellphones, Gorin said.

“People comment anecdotally to me that we seem to be pushing out more information, more helpful information faster,” Gorin said. “And I think that comes from the fact that we have honed our communication systems over the past two years.”

This time the county is also trying to communicate with people early and often — and reserve 911 calls for true emergencies.

In 2017, 911 operators were juggling dozens of calls at once and were often unable to answer calls from people in danger. When fire victims did get through, dispatchers didn't know what to tell them about the safest way to flee the flames.

Now, dispatchers have been specially trained in how to handle fire evacuations.

“We've been very clear that if you need assistance evacuating, if you're physically unable to evacuate, call 911. If you need any other information on evacuation or services, you call 211,” Gorin said.

California as a whole is also changing how it deals with alerts. New legislation that passed in 2018 created statewide standards for how to notify the public about emergencies. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission passed new rules to make those wireless emergency notifications, like an Amber Alert, more effective and fix some of the technical problems that Sonoma County officials say hampered their rescue efforts during the 2017 wildfires.

But perhaps one of the biggest changes, Gorin says, is that people are learning how to deal with trauma as a community.

“We are lending our expertise to counties experiencing traumatic fires on how to reorganize and how to pull together an emergency operations center and how to pull the community volunteers together, which is an essential ingredient to any kind of trauma that a community experiences,” she said.