Innovative Wildfire Management Systems

This article ran earlier this month in Government CIO Insights magazine.

The Sierra Nevada mountain range runs for 250 miles from the Mojave Desert in Southern California north to the Cascades in Oregon. Along the way, the densely forested range goes right through rural Nevada County, California, located about an hour’s drive northeast of the state’s capital, Sacramento. County residents live with the peril of wildfire, with 92% of the county’s 56,000 households located in high or very high wildfire severity zones. This is called the WUI, or wildland-urban interface, the interface where natural wild forests meet residential development. CAL FIRE, the state’s lead fire agency, has a local air attack base at the county’s airport. The frequent sounds of the CAL FIRE “spotter” plane flying overhead spark anxiety across young and old alike, as it means there is a potential wildfire starting nearby.

In 1989, Nevada County’s 49er Fire set new records for that time with over 350 lost homes and launched a new era for California forest management, wildfire fighting tactics, and residential defensible space requirements. Since that time, forests have become even denser and more overgrown, prolonged drought has made the vegetation drier, bark beetle infestations have killed hundreds of thousands of trees, and an ever-growing number of new homes have been built in the WUI. Altogether, this has made the job challenging for Nevada County’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) and local first responders to keep the community they love safe.

?In response to the increasing risk of wildfire, the Nevada County has implemented a variety of cutting-edge technology systems. The county’s emergency services technology systems can be grouped into FEMA’s emergency management four-quadrant framework.

?In the mitigation area, the county’s GIS team created a mobile app for staff to identify, geolocate, capture pictures of, and log hazardous trees for removal. This is a requirement for state and federal mitigation grant programs. County defensible space inspectors ensure residents have the required 100 feet of vegetation clearance around their homes. Inspectors utilize tablets and a mobile application to log and update inspection case file information. On the back end, the system tracks the cases and issues fines and letters as appropriate.

?Public education and outreach are major activities in the emergency preparedness category. The county implemented an award-winning “Ready Nevada County” public dashboard that integrates various “mashups” from third parties. A new and innovative element is an AI/ML-driven resident evacuation pre-planner interface. This creative solution enables residents to see how long it will take them to evacuate based on when they leave during a hypothetical evacuation scenario. The idea is to get residents to leave early, and it really shows the exponential difference in time to get out if they wait too long. The cloud solution is from Ladris, a local company that reached out to the county to offer their advanced technology to assist the community with wildfire risks. A more robust solution is available to emergency managers to use in real-time during live events, helping to plan and see traffic impacts as neighborhoods are evacuated based on wildfire risk and movement. The solution is so impactful that several other counties and cities have now implemented it as well.

?When a wildfire occurs, a system called Zonehaven is leveraged to select zone areas for evacuation. Zones are pre-defined geographic neighborhood areas that are optimally created for size and evacuation egress efficiency. Once a zone is identified for evacuation, its color is changed on an online map available to the general public via the Ready Nevada County dashboard. The dashboard has different colors for zone statuses: normal, warning, or mandatory evacuation. It also displays locations for shelters, animal evacuation shelters, and other key activated community resources. The emergency operations team then sends an emergency alert utilizing a system called CodeRED to the residents living in the zone. CodeRED requires residents to sign up for the service, and the county has partnered with their local 211 call center operator to drive outreach and sign-up assistance.

?All the zones are already loaded into the CodeRED system, so operators simply select the zone(s) and template messages to send out. The system then sends out alerts via phone, email, text, and TTL for hearing-impaired residents. Nevada County is a high tourist destination with many thousands of visitors recreating in local historic Gold Rush-era towns, the Tahoe forest, and the many local trails. To reach these visitors, CodeRED sends the messages out via the Federal WEA (Wireless Emergency Alert) system to every cellphone that is connected to a cell tower covering an impacted zone.

The County Sheriff’s Office leverages several technologies to perform the physical neighborhood evacuation. First, all sheriff and local police vehicles are equipped with the ability to broadcast a Hi-Low siren. This is the siren version you hear European police use. It is distinctively different from US sirens and tells residents that an evacuation is underway as they drive through the neighborhoods. The Sheriff’s Office employs their Search and Rescue (SAR) team to perform door-to-door evacuations to make sure everyone gets out and to help residents who may have functional needs. SAR team members utilize an app called SAR-TOPO that geocodes each home they visit, logging if the residents have left or are sheltering in place. Emergency Operations Center staff back in the command center can watch the consolidated map in real-time, seeing the status as the SAR teams work through neighborhoods.

?Telecommunications can be challenging in rural Nevada County with tall trees, mountains, and deep river valleys. Wildfires frequently start in remote areas where there is no phone, data, or cellphone service whatsoever. To overcome these limitations, a communications platform is deployed called the SatRunner. This mobile and self-contained system mounts on the back of a vehicle and utilizes a satellite communications link to create a ? mile cellphone “bubble” and offer a 1,000-foot WIFI bubble. Together, they enable SAR and first responder teams to have quality phone and data service in the field.

?The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) has gone virtual too. Previously, dozens of people would respond to the physical EOC to work the incident. During the county’s COVID response requiring social distancing, the EOC started using Microsoft Teams. A Team site is now created for each incident, with the Incident Command Structure (ICS) created in Teams channels. The system works very well, such that during the last several EOC Team activations, the virtual EOC has been utilized in addition to the traditional onsite staffing, only requiring ICS section leads to work physically in the EOC. This has increased the EOC team’s efficiency, member accessibility, staffing agility, and cross-section visibility.

?www.readynevadacounty.org

RNC Dashboard https://nevcounty.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=dfae8e3b36e3455bbf9dcc865349e72e

?

?

?