In light of the Jesusita Fire burning near Santa Barbara, the county’s substandard Emergency Operations Center—which coordinates multi-agency response and recovery plans during catastrophes—is under scrutiny from the Santa Barbara County civil grand jury.
In a prescient report released on April 29—one week before the inferno broke out—the grand jury found that operating the EOC out of its current headquarters puts the county in serious jeopardy.
“Virtually all county officials agree, the current interim emergency operations center is inadequate, and yet the Office of Emergency Services is reluctant to find a better location,” the report’s summary states. “To manage all the county agencies that might deal with emergencies, it is critical that we establish an EOC that is dedicated, protected, efficient, and large enough to accommodate all necessary personnel.”
In its report, the grand jury determined that the current EOC site—which consists of modular buildings on concrete pylons—doesn’t meet Federal Emergency Management Agency requirements for an operations center and wouldn’t survive an earthquake or other major natural disaster.
The EOC had to be evacuated and relocated to UC Santa Barbara during the Jesusita Fire, a development that OES Emergency Operations Chief Michael Harris said underscored the importance of a new permanent facility.
“Needless to say, we’ve seen the vulnerability of this building,” Harris said. “Is that to say that any future EOC wouldn’t have to be abandoned? Of course not. But what we clearly recognize is that this one is particularly susceptible to damages by fire.”
In a crisis situation, every moment is crucial. Setting up operations from the time the fire started on May 5 took about two hours, according to Harris.
“When we walk into this building, we’re essentially walking into a classroom with desks and a teaching environment with no computers and no telephones,” Harris said. “We need to reduce that time of operational readiness.”
It took an hour and half for the EOC to relocate to the university after the evacuation orders, Harris said.
Grand jury foreman Ted Sten agreed that the county needs to find a faster solution. The only backup system the county has, according to the latest report, is tents, which the jury concluded aren’t adequate and take too much time to get up and running.
The construction of an adequate EOC facility has been on the county Board of Supervisors’ backburner for years. In 2006, according to the report, the grand jury recommended that the board and county administrators recognize the construction of a more permanent location for the EOC as a top priority.
In 2007, the county conducted a feasibility study on a new EOC facility. The report recommended a 12,740-square-foot site in Santa Barbara, later reduced to 9,300 square feet for financial reasons. The current EOC facility is about 3,670 square feet.
The cost of the project was estimated at between $6.7 and $7.8 million. Then the recession hit, and the board put off the project.
Given the current economic climate, the construction of a bigger and more structurally sound EOC may not be coming in the foreseeable future. Although Harris said the Board of Supervisors is dealing with a “serious fiscal situation,” they recognize the need for a new EOC and already have the money set aside. The agency will present final design plans after upcoming budget hearings and find out from the board whether to put the proposal up for bid or hold onto it.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we need to start having a serious discussion about what we want to do here,” Harris said.
He explained that the agency is trying to design a building that would have more space and be ready in a heartbeat.
“It doesn’t guarantee by any stretch of the imagination that every incident will be managed perfectly, but what it does do is help minimize the things we currently encounter,” Harris said.
According to the grand jury report, the county has already waited too long to set up a dedicated EOC, and even if the necessary funding were available now, it would take years to complete the project. In the meantime, according to the jury’s Sten, the county needs to build an EOC that would function as required—sooner rather than later.
“We believe that the county should be actively looking for sites where they can create an interim EOC that would be more than what they’ve got now,” Sten said. “Maybe not exactly the permanent one that will ultimately will be built, but something that needs to be looked at now.”
The grand jury suggested alternate sites for an EOC in the report, including the basement of the Administration Building, the veterans’ facility on Santa Barbara’s Calle Real, and private vacant office spaces both in that city and in Goleta.
Harris disagreed that moving the EOC to another temporary site would help solve the problem.
“The question is: Do we want an interim to this interim?” Harris said. “If we take money out of this [OES] project, then we’re just leaving ourselves shorter for a real EOC.”
Harris said the agency should continue using the current facility for now and rapidly move forward with the board on building a permanent EOC headquarters.
The OES has 60 to 90 days to respond to the grand jury’s investigative findings and recommendations.
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 14-21, 2009.