When the earth stopped shaking after the 2003 San Simeon earthquake and the smoke cleared from the 2004 Gaviota fires, emergency officials and local radio stations learned an important lesson about their disaster response plans: There was room for improvement.
After the San Simeon quake, radio stations in Santa Maria that would normally have gotten the word out were off the air—not from any seismic damage but because power was unavailable.
“All the hand-cranked radios in the world aren’t going to make a difference if we’re not broadcasting,” said Shawn Knight of Knight Broadcasting, which owns several radio stations in Santa Maria and Santa Ynez.
With the power out, individual readiness plays a key roll at the community level, said County Emergency Operations Chief Michael Harris.
“Think about everything you would do this weekend. How would a power outage affect you? You get in the car and only have a quarter tank of gas. How do you get gas with the power out? You need to go to the store for groceries. With the store’s power out, do you have cash?”
Roy Dugger with the city of Santa Maria agreed with Harris that all the governmental planning in the world is next to nothing unless individuals are prepared. As Santa Maria’s Aware and Prepare program manager, his job is to help city residents do just that.
“All emergency response is based on a couple of really simple premises, one of which being that each individual and family is responsible for their safety.”
Formed in response to a grand jury report that examined response to the 2004 Gaviota fires, Aware and Prepare is Orfalea Fund initiative that aims to “create a community partnership to enhance capabilities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from an emergency or disaster in Santa Barbara County.”
The same report also noted a breakdown in communication between county officials and members of the media, particularly radio stations trying to get the word out.
Knight remembers trying to reach the county public information officer in the wake of the fires.
“His cell phone was so inundated with calls that he couldn’t make an outgoing call,” Knight said.
In the aftermath of the fires, Chief Harris said
the county used a grant from the Orfalea Fund to
provide 5,000 hand cranked radios to needy families in the areas.
To make sure there would be a way to broadcast information to those radios, county officials—also using an Orfalea grant—bought a state-of-the-art satellite phone system and installed it at Knight’s studios on Broadway. The county chose Knight, Harris said, because he was the only station in Santa Maria with a backup generator.
The satellite system wouldn’t only keep the studio’s phone lines and internet connection up and running, but would allow for a real time link between the County Emergency Operations Center and the studio, allowing county officials to broadcast information directly in the event of an emergency.
“If we needed to, we could dig a moat around the building and broadcast completely wirelessly in the event of an emergency,” Knight said.
Contact Staff Writer Nicholas Walter at nwalter@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 4, 2010.