Implements policies and procedures well talk about today. President cleaveland welcome. Thank you. What i thought wed do today is an overview of the alert and warning procedures and policies we have in San Francisco and i would like to talk about three recent incidents because i think if we talk through recent incidents youll get a better idea of our policies and protocols and actions and highlight some of our challenges that we have when we do share information about if were undercommunicating or overcommunicating or using the right system. First, a quick overview of what systems we have in place in San Francisco. Our primary one is alert sf. The biggest thing i think to know about alert sf,its completely opted in. This relies upon the Preparedness Campaign and us going out to the public and encouraging them to sign up. So its very simple to do. This is probably the biggest thing you can do to help us to make sure people are aware of incidents in their neighborhoods. Its very simple to do. You just text 888777 and then in the body of that text you put in alert sf one word and well have the graphic up at the end of the presentation. But just to give you an idea of the reach in San Francisco, we have about 90,000 users. So this is what our Duty Officers used to communicate with the public and this isnt something that our Duty Officers do just on their own accord, this is usually the Fire Department is on the scene or theyre responding to a call after dispatch alerts them to a fire and theres evacuation or avoid the area. So they get the information from the commander. Were in a supporting role and take the lead from commanders in the field. And then we have an alert, a notification system that we use internally. So any time theres an event, were communicating with other offices, the Mayors Office and board of supervisors and its basically our mechanism to communicate internally. And then we have the outdoor public Warning System i think everybody is familiar with, tuesday afternoons at noon we test regularly. We have about 120 sirens across the city, multiple languages programmed into the sirens, we can operate an individual, trigger a group of sirens and then i think you all know the history, it was put in place in 1942 during world war ii. In 2005 we used Homeland Security grants to revamp the system to have a robust process of imminent threats alerting. And we use social media. Media follows us, traditional media follows on twitter. If we put out something on social media and twitter, its picked up by traditional media and amplified. We use facebook, we have about 4,000 followers, not as big of a presence and use next door. I dont know if youre familiar, there are 230,000 users in San Francisco. Thats been a very a good way to enhance communications to neighborhoods if there is an event. And then we can also use the integrative public alert and Warning System. This is managed by the federal government. This consists of the wireless Emergency Alerts, it got a lot of attention after the incident in hawaii and has the Emergency Alert system we partner with radio and tv to put out Emergency Alerts over radio and tv. Let me talk a little bit about three incidents that may give you an idea of how the alerts are actually triggered and the process behind them. Going back to february 6th, a High Pressure gas leak break due to construction. It was a tuesday afternoon about 3 30, dispatch gets notified of the report of the gas line break, comes in, theres about 10 buildings that are ultimately evacuated as determined by the Fire Department on scene. The Fire Department requests our assistance for Public Information officers. We have a very Good Partnership with the Fire Department. Rpo gets dispatched out. Our duty officer has got a system in place that he or she could draw around the impacted areas to send out and avoid the area. Shelter in place order very quickly to the people. Again, let me go back to, that is alert sf. If you have opted in, youre going to get the alerts. If you havent opted in, youre not. Thats our reporting mechanism and we send it out on twitter and next door. Thats the big contrast to the wireless Emergency Alerts where we target an area of the city and say okay, regardless if you have opted in or not, were going to alert you via your cell phone whether you have registered or not. But some of the other things during that incident, our duty officer and manager on call, we have four managers on call, im one of them that rotate every two weeks. We start thinking okay, if the initial reports from pg and e is were going to repair the gas line and it could take an hour or five hours. Thats a difference if we evacuated 10 buildings. Do we need shelter, we que up american red cross, Salvation Army and i think as you look ahead, i got the idea that you wanted us to talk a little bit about some of the challenges. I mean getting more detailed information about what is in the buildings, who lives there, is there vulnerable populations or anybody children or seniors or has access and functional needs. Those are all areas of improvement for us. I think we have a Robust Program now, but im looking forward to taking it further in the future. The second incident is the magnitude initially it was a magnitude 8. 0 earthquake off the coast of alaska. We got notification about 1 30 a. M. Back on january 23rdrd. So i mean we follow tsunami threats and earthquake, if its a major earthquake like that and is in a zone off the coast of alaska or washington oregon, those are capable of triggering a tsunami. We didnt know it was 70 miles off so it didnt trigger a tsunami. But the notifications we rely on or the National TsunamiWarning Center. Their initial warning to us was california is under a tsunami watch. So what that means is a watch is an earthquake has occurred that is capable of generating a tsunami. Our initial reports were the first waves could get to San Francisco at 6 20 or 6 40. So during those the course of the next couple of hours, obviously were in the position of what do we tell the public, we still dont know if its going to materialize into a tsunami. The actions were based on information we had at the time. We put out an alert sf to the population along the coast that could be inundated in the worst Case Scenario with the message of Pay Attention and stay tuned. We put out on twitter accounts and we had media there early in the morning. It was probably three hours before any waves would have happened. But then the National TsunamiWarning Center and the sensors in the ocean came in, they didnt notice a rise in sea level that would significant an actual tsunami. At about 4 12, two and a half hours later, the watch was cancelled. So we racheted back down the Public Information and just to give you challenges on that, we got every where on the scale of why on earth did you send out alert sf and wake us up, to why didnt you alert us via cell phone, the outdoor sirens to wake us up. I think we made the right decision, if we woke everybody up at 3 00 in the morning, we may not be presenting on this today. Youre always looking at the balance of information and given that we had several hours of warning if it did materialize, im confident we made the right call on that. The last scenario i would like to go through or just incident, was the 4. 4 earthquake in the east bay we had. Which was about 10 miles away southeast of burkely. So we sent out a public alert confirming and i think there was initial conversation about should we put out an alert, its 2 40 in the morning. But for us, we want to confirm to the public that yes, an earthquake has occurred, the shaking you felt was a seismic event, please dont call 911. Sure enough a spike in calls to 911, was that an earthquake we felt. Thats something we want people to avoid doing. And we triggered our mechanism with the manager on call program to do an inventory of damage assessments to city infrastructure. Fortunately it was lowlevel magnitude earthquake but for us, two things i think underscored, one, the need for an earthquake early Warning System that is embedded in Critical Infrastructure sites like fire stations and schools and given this particular incident 10 miles away, we only got one second of warning. Theres potential to get greater number of seconds if the epicenter is further away in the east bay or further south and still have violent shaking here. Its one of the areas our executive director is very passionate about and engaged and pointed to the state california Advisory Board for earthquake Early Warning in california and sits on the usds National Panel for how to implement the Warning Center along the west koeblcoas. We have applied for a Mitigation Grant program and that would hopefully, you know, allow the Fire Department, if they choose to do so or if we can get the technology in place, to open up the Fire Department doors as soon as you have a severe enough magnitude earthquake. The reason thats important, you dont want the doors to be a jar after the earthquake, you want assets to be able to get out of the station and respond to the fires we expect after a big earthquake and we could do programs at schools to allow them to drop cover and hold when they get the alert of an earthquake. So those are some of the things that were looking forward to or working with. I would be delighted to answer questions and president cleaveland, again, thank you for always being engaged. I appreciate it. President cleaveland thank you mr. Dayton. I appreciate the report. Anna, did you have anything you wanted to add before Public Comment . Im fine. Unless you have questions. President cleaveland Public Comment . Seeing none, Public Comment is closed. Commissioner veronese. Commissioner veronese welcome mr. Dayton. Would you consider the system we have as state of the art here in San Francisco . I would. Commissioner veronese you would. And when they had the earthquake in mexico, they have an early Warning System that gave them 1015 seconds of warning. Why do we not have that system . I think i guess fortunately for mexico, their epicenters to mexico city, they have a significant distance, they can have a longer warning, but unfortunately for where were located, the proximity is so close to us, it will be hard if theres an epicenter close by to want to eliminate the blind zone and to get the critical seconds that matter. Its really the factor of the distance of the epicenter. Commissioner veronese so its not mexico having technology that we dont have . Correct. Commissioner veronese so the placement renders the technology useless. Correct. Commissioner veronese the night that the tsunami warning came in, if theres going to be an emergency like that, i didnt get the text until i woke up, i would be under water by that point but i set my phone not to receive texts before 7 00 a. M. Or id be divorced. The reason i ask the question, if there had been a tsunami, if it were more serious and you had seen the raise in water levels, would there have been a different alert you would have done that would have gotten me out of bed that night . We definitely if its imminent, we would have used wireless Emergency Alerts along the coast. If there was threat of imminent threat we would use outdoor sirens and pull all the stops. Commissioner veronese my confusion as a consumer of alert sf, when i saw that i thought okay, theres a sue tsunami coming. That was my impression, but at that point it was too late because it was after 6 20. But it wasnt clear to me i didnt receive a followup saying there is no stsunami and it wasnt clear when i received the text, what i was supposed to do. If it had been real, would i have received a follow up text as to what im supposed to do. We as a Fire Department, were the ones out there in the streets trying to clean up the mess of whats happened, right . And i say that in the sense that people like me, regular people who are receiving the Text Messages are wondering okay, tsunami is coming, what am i supposed to do. Do these alerts tell you as a consumer what to do . Do they say for example go to high ground or is it just theres a tsunami coming . They are more detailed, i think were advising some of the language to make it clear, be prepared for the potential and really underscore the potential if it is a watch. We did get a lot of feedback like hey, we really thought this was going to happen. I appreciate that feedback and also the feedback that hey, it should be more specific, okay, what do what does that mean for me where i live in the city. We do have precrafted messaging if it reached the level of warning that led to imminent evacuation, we would have used multiple methods of alerts, including the amber alert that would have gone over opting out of text. We would have relied on that. We know the evacuation zones. I dont know if you know youre in the tsunami zone or not. Commissioner veronese i am. Okay. So theres extremely comprehensive policies and protocols we have built out with our tsunami. Commissioner veronese on the messaging side, we know we have all these other ways to raise the alert and you would have gotten extensive other messaging. I got one text not knowing that the other alerts would have come, the message i got tsunami expected to hit San Francisco at 6 20 and thats all i got. Im thinking okay, its 7 30, the coast is clear but i look over my wife and think if i had gotten it through the night and not slept through it, what would i have done. There was no followup message saying we expect it to come at 6 20 but were watching it closely and well text you again so we know were going to sit tight and wait for you guys to tell us what to do knowing there were other systems. I felt unprepared and if it were real, i would have been dead at that point. Ill check. I know we sent a followup alert sf once the watch was cancelled. I mean, we were very cognizant of that and probably woken up people at 3 30 in the morning and we want to reassure people that the threat is no long there. So ill follow up to see why you didnt receive it. Commissioner veronese im not sure people would be bothered if you sent out the amber alert one as long as they knew that were watching this and will give you further information opposed to this is going to hit at 6 20. Our goal is to empower people, not incite panic or sense of what do i do now . The communication is alert sf and the others highlighted. Commissioner veronese being in San Francisco we know were going to get an alert at some point. Maybe you do have a personal plan. I believe you do. Lets say its a tsunami, the alerts are hey, go to higher ground, these are areas with higher ground, is there an instructional phase 2 the alerts such as we the citizens can be reassured that were going to get good information from the city at the right time . I hear the alerts on tuesdays. I just wonder when this alert, when and if this thing is going to be real, is it going to be useful to me . I hope so. Thats our aim, to be useful and actionable and will have the direction that youre getting at. Commissioner veronese can you walk me through what the alert would be if there were a tsunami . Yes. We would do the traditional alert sf and all the other ones, we would do the amber alert wirelessly to your cell phone and coordinating with police and Fire Department and those areas. And we would use the outdoor public sirens. It would be a tailoredspecific message for the areas we expect it and would add get to shelter locations. Commissioner veronese you have the messages preplanned. Theyre loaded in the system. Commissioner veronese is there a reason why its not part of your presentation. I would interested in seeing what absolutely. Commissioner veronese what the city would tell me to do. And it would be nice to train the public on it so its not a surprise the first time it happens. You have the early Warning System happening every tuesday, it would be nice to put a message out there, if this was a real emergency, this is what the city would be for example, in an earthquake. This is what we would tell you to do, or a tsunami. Otherwise its information youre getting in the middle of the night, if it happens in the middle of the night and youre really not prepared for it. And having 800,000 people not prepared for an emergency is avoidable. Definitely. We have tsunami preparedness month and walk coming up in march that we would love your participation. Commissioner veronese tsunami walk. Exciting. Anthony rivera operations, we knew we had time when we were first alerted, we did notify the assistant chiefs. We have our plan in place. To their defense, they did send out a follow up at 4 39, we did get it. Its similar to what fire contained or fire under control. Thats basically what they do when they send out the message, its mitigated. In this case we had a lot of time. Obvio