A new civil grand jury report in Contra Costa County is raising a red flag about the county system for warning people during a major disaster. The worry is that the system isn't truly ready for a major emergency.
NBC Bay Area spoke with Richmond councilmember Soheila Bana, who is among those who have raised concerns about emergency preparedness.
“We live in a wildfire area and we need to be as prepared as possible,” she said.
Bana also founded the West Contra Costa Fire Safe Council in 2022.
“We believe there is a serious issue. We would hate to see what other communities who have gone through the wildfire go through, like we didn’t know what was wrong, we didn’t have preparation for this,” she said.
The concern is about the Contra Costa County’s community warning system, which the civil grand jury said is at risk of failing in a major disaster.
“The way the community warning system current works, it has a major latency and that incident commander needs to contact the dispatcher, the dispatcher contacts the sheriff's office or community warning system,” Bana said.
The civil grand jury report also suggests about 70% of Contra Costa County residents who haven’t registered with the system may not receive alerts in a major disaster. There are recent drills, which triggered another set of red flags.
“When we had a couple of evacuation drills in the city of Richmond, it didn’t work the way it should have, like the start alert came after the end alert to some residents. Sometimes, there is a latency a gap,” Bana said.
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The grand jury is recommending the county auto enroll all residents and businesses for the warnings. It also calls on the county to install a loud speaker system throughout the county for public warnings and said there should be a trained alert system operator on duty 24/7 at the sheriff’s dispatch center.
“I’m very hopeful that the system will improve a lot because the county Board of Supervisors is asked to take certain steps, in terms of doing a study in terms of redundancy, to increase enrollment, to improve the system and make it faster and to have an advisory board,” Bana said.
NBC Bay Area reached out to the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office but haven’t heard back yet.
The county issued a statement, which read it part that it was" reviewing the grand jury report and does not comment until the board of supervisors has reviewed the document and adopted a formal response.”
The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office has 60 days to respond to the report, and the Board of Supervisors has 90 days.
You can read the full report in the document below.
