The wildfires were still raging out of control early Oct. 12 when a top Sonoma County official warned elected leaders of a simmering controversy that was about to become a public relations nightmare.
Journalists were beginning to scrutinize the county's failure to send mass cellphone alerts during the first hours of the Oct. 8 firestorm.
Peter Rumble, then a deputy county administrator who was helping run the county's civilian emergency command center, told the Board of Supervisors in a 5:26 a.m. email that at least one Bay Area news outlet was preparing a critical story about “what they see as inadequate notice of evacuation” as the fires spread.
Rumble wasn't worried, describing the media attention on warnings as a “consistent theme” during emergencies.
“I'm a little surprised it is coming so soon, however,” he wrote.
Nearly eight hours later, the situation became more urgent. A television news crew unexpectedly showed up at the emergency center, another county official wrote at 1:06 p.m. in a nine-member group text message that included all five supervisors.
The TV crew had interviewed the county's emergency manager, Christopher Helgren. The story could be negative, Assistant County Administrator Christina Rivera texted the group.
Some included on the Oct. 12 text thread were dismayed. They viewed the scrutiny of warnings as premature and felt inclined to defend the county's emergency response so far.
“Special place in hell for people who want to play the blame game right now,” Rumble texted about 5:38 p.m.
The exchanges, obtained by The Press Democrat through a public records request, show how officials scrambled to respond to growing public backlash and critical media coverage of the failure to issue more widespread warnings about the firestorm.
The communications are included among more than 1,000 pages of Sonoma County documents, including emails, text messages and reports shared among county supervisors and several top county officials from the outset of the wildfires through February.
The records show how county leaders were confronted by intense public vitriol regarding emergency alerts for months after the fires were contained. And they reflect some of the internal steps county leaders took to respond to that criticism and prevent it from resurfacing the next time disaster strikes.
Taking focus off response
One county official was particularly displeased to hear journalists came to the emergency operations center to ask about the alerts in the afternoon of Oct. 12, four days after the fires erupted.
TV cameras don't belong in that setting, Supervisor Lynda Hopkins wrote in the group text thread.
“Vultures circling while we are still issuing evacuation notices,” Hopkins said. “A countywide evacuation notice would have resulted in chaos and even more fatalities.”
In addition to Hopkins, the group text message included the other four elected supervisors - Shirlee Zane, James Gore, David Rabbitt and Susan Gorin- as well as Rumble, Rivera, County Administrator Sheryl Bratton and Rebecca Wachsberg, a deputy county administrator who was the county's primary spokeswoman at the time.
Hopkins, in the same message, offered praise for Helgren, the emergency manager who would retire in March under heavy scrutiny.
“I'm sure Chris did a great job. You all have made all the right calls, and I will defend every decision that our EOC has made,” Hopkins texted.
Rabbitt subsequently texted to the group that The Press Democrat also wanted to access to the emergency operations center for a potential story. He suggested the story - which never happened - could present an opportunity to “counter” the emerging storyline about the county's alerting shortfalls.
Rumble instead proposed the county work with its spokespeople to “take the circus away from our response efforts,” perhaps through sit-down interviews at another government office.
Rumble, who said he worked graveyard shifts in the emergency operations center as long as 16 or 17 hours at the height of the wildfires, agreed in an interview that the public and media should pay close attention to the county's emergency notification process. But the debate began too soon, in his view.
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