By J.D. Morris
The Press Democrat
SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. — Few Sonoma County residents received official alerts telling them about the approaching October firestorm and many received no advance warning at all, according to The Press Democrat Poll.
Those who were warned more often found out about the unfolding natural disaster from friends, family members and neighbors, according to respondents in the telephone poll, which surveyed 500 registered Sonoma County voters in the first week of May.
Nonetheless, more than half of those surveyed in the poll said they feel the county is better prepared to warn them about disasters now than it was last year. And a majority of respondents -- 59 percent -- also said county officials provided effective leadership during the first week of the fires, which in Sonoma County destroyed nearly 5,300 homes and killed 24 people.
The poll results reinforce concerns local residents have voiced since the earliest part of the disaster, when many had to flee their homes in the middle of the night without any kind of advance notice from government officials or law enforcement.
At the same time, the survey indicates many agree with the steps county leaders have taken over the past seven months to address the failure in emergency warnings and improve dispatch operations that were unprepared for the unprecedented disaster.
“When you look at these sorts of things and you go through a disaster as severe as what happened in the county, you might expect a lot of anger or unhappiness with the general institutions,” said David Binder, whose San Francisco firm conducted the poll on the newspaper’s behalf. “When you see like 60 percent of the county saying yes, they provided effective leadership, that impresses me as being a really positive finding.”
Angel Edwards, who lived in Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighborhood, told pollsters she got no formal notice as the Tubbs fire tore through northern Santa Rosa on the first night of the fires. It jumped six lanes of Highway 101 and destroyed 1,200 homes in Coffey Park, including hers.
“I started seeing red in the clouds all around us; the wind was so torrid,” Edwards, 35, recalled. “Something just told me in the pit of my stomach, ‘Go. Just go.’?”
By the time a friend called Edwards to tell her that Coffey Park was on fire, she had already packed the car. She, her husband and their three young children fled for their lives as huge fireballs rained down around them, she said.
Edwards was among the largest single group of respondents to a poll question that asked people what type of warning they had received about the fires. Respondents were allowed to provide multiple responses, and the question was not limited to those directly in the path of the flames.
Forty-three percent said they received no warning at all about the firestorm, including six massive fires and a half-dozen smaller blazes that erupted the night of Oct. 8 and burned simultaneously out of control across Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties.
A family member or friend warned 28 percent of respondents, and 14 percent said a neighbor alerted them.
Official alerts via cellphone were received by 17 percent of those who participated in the poll, while 5 percent received landline alerts and 5 percent said police officers or firefighters came to their home and warned them.
Copyright 2018 The Press Democrat