you you you you you you you you you you the Yes, I believe he is online. That's okay. I can. Yes, I believe he is online. you That's it. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to call this city session to order and we're going to go ahead and before we do our roll call, we're going to have James make a special announcement about one of our council members. Yes. So council member Webster Lincoln requested or put in a request to appear remotely. This specific request does require council approval as it's the general description would be a physical or family medical emergency that prevents a member from attending the meeting in person. And so I now welcome the council to make a motion to approve council member Lincoln's remote appearance. Make a motion to approve council member Lincoln's remote appearance. I second. Oh, okay. So do we do roll call for this? Okay. Yes. We can have a roll call for mayor Barragan? Yes. Vice Mayor Dynan? Yes. Council Member Brieco? Yes. And Council Member Romero. Motion carries and Council Member Lincoln will be attending remotely. The only, there's only we need to confirm a couple of things before we proceed. Councilmember Lincoln, is there anyone over the age of 18 present in your room currently? No. Okay, thank you. And then, so yeah, that confirms it and Mr. Lincoln can appear remotely. Great thank you James we're going to go ahead and go to item two which is the approval of the agenda. Do we have anybody that would like to make a motion for the approval of the agenda? Hi, Shaka. Okay so roll call again please James all I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry do that, James, can you please remind the public of the instructions for our translation services before we move on? Thank you. Yes. So there, um, there will be translation interpretation services offered during this meeting. If you would like to listen to the Spanish portions of this meeting, usually at public comment, please use the interpretation feature located at the bottom of your screen by clicking on the globe icon and selecting English as your preferred language. If you would like to hear this meeting in Spanish, there will be interpretes disponibles in this meeting to access them. Please use the interpretation mode, located in the back of your screen, pressing the icon of the little and choosing the Spanish as its preferred language. Thank you. Okay, perfect. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and we're moving on to item four, which is our study session. We're going on to item 4.1, emergency preparedness program, work reviews. So I believe this will be handled by Denise. Yes, hi. Thank you. We have four guest speakers that are going to bell can see her presentation go to the chair. To the chair, I have a question. Sure. Did we have public comment or are there any public comments submitted? No, there are none. Okay, thank you. Uh-hmm. Okay. Is it working? Hi everyone. I'm Belle fore Lucien with the USGS earthquake science center. Oh, how can I advance the slide? Healed it. Okay. Okay. So our offices are in Moffat Field, down in Mountain View, not too far from where we are here in East Palo Alto. So I'm going to talk briefly today about earthquakes and their associated hazards and specifically how they affect East Palo Alto. Next slide, please. So I'm sure everyone knows this, but an earthquake is, it's worth reviewing, an earthquake is the sudden shaking of the earth that occurs because of sudden slip along a fault. So to know the hazards from earthquakes, we need to know where the faults are and how largely earthquakes they are likely to produce. So here are a couple of historical photos of from the San Andreas earthquake in 1906 that cause offset of this fence and also this road, which is now highway 92, but some of you may recognize. Next slide please. So the last major Bay Area earthquake which I'm sure many here remember was the Loma Preta earthquake in 1989. That actually had an epicenter way down south near Santa Cruz but much of the damage was concentrated 60 miles north of that in San Francisco and Oakland. And that was because of vulnerable land in those areas. The bay mud that many structures such as the Cypress Viaduct were built on, amplified the shaking and in some cases liquefied. So earthquakes like this are inevitable, but these disastrous consequences are not. There's quick science gives us information we need to build resilient societies. Next slide, please. So this is an overview of the earthquake hazards in the San Francisco Bay region, and this is one of the flyers that I have in the back for that those can, in the room, can collect later. So each of the numbers on this map represents a probability of earthquakes occurring on that fault line in the time period between 2014 and 2043. So you can see that there are some major players on this map include the San Andreas fault. That has earthquakes every 150 to 250 years and the last one was in 1906. So that, if you crunch the numbers there, it's unlikely but not impossible to have a large or upshare soon. On the other side of the bay we have the Hayward fault that you've probably heard about. That actually has earthquakes a little bit more frequently with an average of about 150 years. and the last rupture there was in 1868. So if you do that math, it's quite likely to have a large earthquake soon. However, because there is variability, it could also be decades before the next large hayward fault earthquake. Next slide, please. There are also numerous other less active faults on this map. Those are all the yellow lines that you can see. Each of these individual faults probably has earthquakes every several hundred or several thousand years, but there are a lot of these faults. So taken collectively earthquakes would occur on one of these less active faults. There's a 13% chance within 30 years of a larger clique somewhere on one of these faults. So there's a substantial hazard from these lesser known faults. And next slide, the South Napa earthquake in 2014 is a perfect example of this. So that was a magnitude six on one of these little studied faults, but pretty significant damage. Next slide, please. So to add all this together, there's a 72% chance of an earthquake above magnitude seven, somewhere in this region before 2043. So that's pretty likely. Next, please. So I will briefly go through the hazards that we face from these earthquakes and how they affect east phallaltoces specifically. So first of all, there's the hazard from shaking. Next slide. So basically there are so many faults in the Bay Area that anywhere you look would have a likely, likely within 50 years. So let's say 50% chance within 50 years of very strong shaking. We call that intensity 7 on this color scale that you may have seen. What this, there are many different models and they have slight differences between them. I'm showing this model to highlight the effect of that sediment or bay mud, which is amplifying the shaking. The closer you get to the bay, basically, the more amplification you would see from that. And that could potentially push things into the severe to violent shaking. Next slide, please. Yes. So then we have fault displacement. So in this picture, again, you can see this fence has been snapped off, and maybe that's not such a big deal if it's a fence, but if you have a structure on top of that or perhaps a pipeline where you beneath that, that's going to be a problem. So next slide, please. In East Palo Alto, that's probably not a significant risk because there are a few faults. You can see on this map, the San Jose fault label there passes through each fellow alto, but these are not very active faults. Not certainly nothing in comparison to the San Andreas or Hayward fault. So the likelihood of fault displacement within East Pell alto is low. However, there could be offsets on the Hayward fault of the San Andreas fault might sever lifelines such as gas gas pipelines that would have an effect. Next slide please. Continue. Okay, so that brings us to liquefaction. So what is liquefaction? That is when you have a sediment that is saturated with water that essentially liquefies during earthquake shaking. shaking. It turns to soup and that can cause heavy objects on top to sink into it. So this is showing a car and also some buildings. These buildings didn't sustain much damage from the shaking itself, but essentially tilted and sank into the mud because it liquefied during shaking. And that is a significant risk in East Palo Alto. If we can have the next slide, please. So basically, you can, and there's a link to this map at the end so you can go look it up, but essentially all around the Bay, there are moderate to high risks of liquefaction due to the saturated or potentially saturated sediments that exist close to the Bay and in East Palell also in particular. Next slide please. Landsliding. Sorry that was too many slides. Landsliding, good news for East Pell also because there's no slopes and you would need a significant slope for landsliding to occur. So that's not something we need to worry about here. However, tsunamis are a potential minor risk. Next slide, please. So essentially, all around the entire California coast has a risk from tsunamis from either local earthquakes or potentially earthquakes much farther away, such as Alaska or Japan. However, being on the coast within San Francisco Bay does decrease that risk because the tsunami amplitudes would be decreased being in the bay. It's somewhat sheltered. So this is a tsunami hazard zone map for East Palo Alto. And you can see that essentially this is not a USGS product. This is as Noah actually is the one that does synomics, but as you can see, the tsunami hazard areas are largely the park or salt pond areas, not really the developed areas. So the concern would be getting a tsunami alert to people who might be in those areas. And again, those alerts are managed by NOAA, not USGS. Next slide please. So I will only briefly go through the preper- the earthquake preparation because I understand some other people are going to focus on that, but earthquakes are going to keep happening, but we can reduce damage and losses by taking appropriate preparations and actions. Next slide please. So the big thing, the most important thing to do is to retrofit or build good buildings that are going to be resistant to earthquakes. There's a common phrase that we say, which is that earthquakes don't kill people buildings do. If you're outside and far away from any buildings, you will be finding the Earth like basically no matter how large. So those are building codes, zoning to not build buildings right on top of an active fault, for example, and then retrofitting buildings that already exist. Next slide please. We also have earthquake early warnings. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. Next slide please. So, Nami warnings are also, again, managed by NOAA. Next slide slide please. Synonymy warnings are also again managed by Noah. Next slide please. And then there's of course personal and municipal emergency preparation. And I'll point people to the wonderful steps to earthquake safety at earthquakecountry.org. And there's also flyers in the back. Next slide please. So many of these materials are geared toward personal preparation but I think anyone here can think about how the city could facilitate people in making these kinds of preparations. And I'm not going to go through all these details here but I like to emphasize that there's a lot of information, there's a lot of preparation that you can do, and it's easy for that to become overwhelming. So I think it's important to emphasize that doing something is better than doing nothing. You shouldn't worry if you can't do everything on this list. You could do, if you can do just one thing, try to focus on the most important thing, the most impactful thing. So just as an example, at the top there, number one is securing your space, focus on areas where you spend the most time, your desk, your bed, is there something heavy that's going to fall onto it? Secure that and you've gotten 90% of the way back. I think I probably don't have much more time, so if we can just advance through the details of these slides, you can read this in the other materials. Water is a super high priority for emergency supplies, and I saw in the report associated with this meeting that there's a lot of focus on water supplies, and that's great that is absolutely the right thing to do. Yes, so during an earthquake, again, think about where you spend most of your time. What are you going to do if you're in bed? Next slide please. If you're in bed, turn face down, protect your head and neck with a pillow. Don't jump and get out of bed. It's better to stay in bed. Next, if you're outside, stay outside and away from buildings. Next, if you're inside, stay inside, don't run outside and drop, cover, and hold on. So that is get it under a sturdy table or a desk to protect yourself from falling objects. And there's modifications to that. If you have limited mobility, for example, and there's more details you can find both on the flyers and on those websites. Next slide, please. So I'll just briefly talk about a Shake Alert earthquake early warning. So Shake Alert is a USGS service that detects earthquakes very quickly and then sends an alert that can reach many people before shaking arrives. And those alerts are delivered to both automated systems, such as trains and public address systems and to mobile phones. With the mobile phones, there's a variety of ways that you can get the alerts, either through wea or different apps or the Android operating system. Next slide, please. So based on the method of delivery of the alert, there's a magnitude threshold. So that is an earthquake has to reach a certain magnitude before an alert is sent out. And then once an alert is sent out, it's sent to the phones or devices that are within an area that's expected to see a certain intensity of shaking. So you may have gotten some of these recently in the last few years, and I just wanted to provide that background on how it works. So we can continue to the final slide, which has a bunch of online resources for all of the things that I talked about. Faults map, recent earthquakes, liquefaction, Shake alert, earthquake preparedness info,, all that stuff is in here. And I would be happy to take any questions. Thank you so much for the informative presentation. I guess one of the reasons why you're here is to present us with new information. And I was aware of some of this, but I was unaware that there's a San Jose fault going through East Palo Alto. Could you speak more of that? I mean, it seems like even if it's not going to do a lot of regional damage, if we have a, let's say, a 6.0 shaking in East Palo Alto, that could be a tremendous I guess also with aftershocks, is this the sort of thing where like maybe there's a huge earthquake and then this one would go as an aftershock just because things are adjusting or maybe my impression is there's plates, they move around and when you move one thing, everything else has to move to adjust. So if you could just speak a little bit about that, I mean, I know you think. Certainly so unfortunately I can't provide much information about the San Jose fault because we just don't know very much about it. It's been identified as a fault. I think mainly based on subsurface data so that would be things like exploration for oil and gas. They do seismic wave experiments and they may have identified that there's a fault there. But we really don't know anything about how often it has earthquakes or when the last one was. Certainly, if it were to have a magnitude six, like in Napa, for example, that could be very devastating. But the chances of that are still very low in comparison to say a haward fault earthquake, which would be honestly not that much better, even though it doesn't pass through Eastphalalt directly. And to answer your question, your second question, yes. We do know that once one earthquake happens, that puts more stress on like neighboring faults in the area. So yes, they're not, I like to think of them a little bit independently from aftershocks, which are sort of an adjustment of the area immediately around where a large earthquake happens, whereas what you're talking about there would be more like triggering another earthquake on a separate fault. But both of those happen. So yes, I mean, that's a possibility. Again, we don't know anything about that fault in particular and whether it would be likely to behave in that way. Yeah, thank you for your presentation. I was curious if you have any observations and we may hear from other people about retrofitting buildings, you know, as your quote stated, the buildings that can kill a lot of people. So what is your sense of the status of buildings in general? And also, I mean, I think later on as we consider what other things the city could do. Obviously, the city government cannot take care of everything, cannot do everything. No entity can do that, but at least having information, if it's up to each city to conduct a survey, or at least the major buildings, it's set up to the homeowners to have an idea, apartment buildings, large buildings to kind of have a status report of some sort that our city could give at some point. But just in general, what is your sense of where that stands or how people handle that? I know that's probably very expensive, but there may be some key buildings that need to be paid attention to. And at least also letting homeowners know or somehow they should find out because they could perhaps make some repair or some things in some strategic places. And for sure, I think in apartment buildings, I know that on the west side, I think some years back and they might have received the grant. There were some buildings that had appeared that were doing some buttressing, you know, to reinforce, I guess, the bottom part, you know, places where like there was an underground garage. But, yeah, I think it's a little bit about that and I'm sure that, you know, later as we learn more, we can see what we can do. Thank you. Yes, so I'm not an engineer, so I can't speak to the details about that, but certainly that is one of the areas in which governments city governments can take quite an active role. So I'm aware of some efforts done by San Francisco, San Francisco, for example. A few years back, they had a program where they were identifying buildings. They did a survey of vulnerable buildings like that and were identifying. I think they had some incentive programs for doing retrofits, but then they also did things like posting on the buildings if it was considered to be unsafe during an earthquake. One particular style of construction of concern is what's called soft story, which is the underground garage type thing that you mentioned. That was a lot of collapse of those types of structures in the 1989 earthquake and others. That's a very common style in San Francisco. I don't know so much in East Palo Alto, but that's a low-hanging fruit for retrofit, certainly. What the single-story wood frame houses tend to perform very well in earthquakes. My sense is that's what's most common in East Palo Alto. There are in the seven steps to earthquake safety, I didn't go through the retrofritting parting detail, but there are more details in there about some relatively simple steps that can be taken to make homes, single family homes, more resilient. And those are things like bolting to the foundation and reinforcing triple walls in the basement. So there are some relatively low cost steps that can be taken. Thank you. I hope that answered your question. Could you speak a little bit more? You said there was a 72% chance or somebody said there's a 72% chance of there being a major earthquake before was a 2045 or 2043. 4043 was the time period. It was like a very random date. Could you speak more about that? It was 30 years after the NAPA earthquake. Okay. It was done. Okay, perfect. You know, but could you just talk about that and how they statistically came up with that or, you know, just in general, how we should think about that number? Sure, absolutely. So that is taking everything that we know about all of the faults on that map that I showed, the most active ones like the San Andreas and all the less active ones like the yellow ones. Everything we know about how fast the faults are moving, how frequently they have earthquakes, and how large those earthquakes tend to be. And you essentially crunch all of those numbers, and you end up with that chance. So that's, it could be any of those faults in the picture, put it all together. That's the chance of an earthquake above magnitude 6.7. Somewhere in the Bay Area, any of those faults. And that is taking into account of things like the Hayward fault being very close to its expected recurrence interval. So the Hayward fault is the one that is most likely to produce that earthquake out of the ones in the picture. Yeah, I guess, you know, we look at emergency preparedness as insurance. You know, it might not be happened today. It might happen 20 years from now, but that's kind of a scary number. If you told me there's almost a three and four chance, we're going to have a major earthquake and it could be five miles from East Palo Alto. It could be underneath East Palo Alto. It could be, you know, close by. So thank you. I have no further questions. Thank you. I have no further questions. Thank you. I don't know if we have any more questions from the council at this moment. Mr. Lincoln, do you have any questions or comments at this time? No, I don't have any questions at this time. Do we have any questions, James, online or in person? No, okay. Well, thank you so much for the report and for your presentation. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, Bell. We will have the County Department of Emergency Management and Truthie is here to present. Is that better? Thank you, council members, for having me here today. I am the Director of Emergency Management for San Mateo County. Next slide. So, our mission at the county level is to build resiliency by empowering our communities and sent strengthening operational capabilities and coordination before, during and after emergencies. And our vision is to become the most resilient county in the United States. Next slide. Next slide. So when we talk about emergency management, we think about this full cycle of emergency management. that includes preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery. So as Bella was talking about the preparedness piece of it, you know, anchoring things to the wall, learning, drop cover hold, those are the preparedness pieces of it. That is done at the county level, at the city level, and also at a personal level. Then we have mitigation. So those are the things that you are talking about, about doing a survey of soft stories, understanding the risk, and then mitigating that risk, including maybe strategically planting funds, so we can retrofit a building, for example. Response happens when there's an earthquake. We have first responder partners 9-1-1, all respond to the event or the incident. And then they coordinate with the local entities, including the cities and also county government. Recovery happens more at the, there's two types of recovery. One is psychological recovery where an individual recovers to what the new normal looks like, and then there is actually the economic recovery. And a lot of times in the emergency management cycle, we talk about economic recovery being important. So getting funds from FEMA, usually, FEMA would give you 75% and local jurisdictions would give FEMA 25% of what it costs to run that response. Next slide. A big portion of this equation is resiliency building at an individual level. They are half of the equation. So we as cities, we as counties, we as first responder entities can only do 50%. We require each individual in the county to actually prepare for 72 hours and be ready for any disasters, including a massive earthquake. Next slide. Next slide. So what does it mean in terms of preparedness mitigation response and recovery from a day-to-day activities from a county level? It's planning having training and exercises, doing public education outreach, making sure our alert and warning systems are a go mitigation that includes vegetation management or flood mitigation, working with other partners to do that hazard mapping response. We at the county level are responsible for the operational area. City of East Palo Alto is a partner in that and that you are a city that we would be responsible from an up area perspective. So you would run your own emergency operation center and we would coordinate with you all during a disaster or a response. There is someone at the Office of the Department of Emergency Management that's their 24-7 that's able to answer calls or respond to disasters or emergencies so we can activate the Emergency Operations Center. area briefings, coordination, and then recovery, cost recovery, initial damage estimates. Those are the things that we would be responsible for. Next slide. So what does this look like from a standardized emergency management system? We are required by the state and the feds to use the standardized emergency management system. And we've done some digging and we've, for the entire county, the risks that we have based on 70 years of data. Again, 70 years of data looking back, it's not what's looking forward. The risks are severe weather with flooding, wildfire risk, and earthquakes. For the city of Ispalolto, it's really severe weather with flooding. Flooding is one of your biggest risks over the next few years, and will continue to be one of your biggest risks over the next few years, then we'll continue to be one of your biggest risks. And then, earthquake becomes the next one because you don't necessarily have too much of wild land interface. So we're going to talk about a storm situation and what that looks like. So if there's a severe storm that requires first responders to respond to that storm, whether that is working with businesses, whether that's working with businesses or working with schools, your first responders are really your go-to for any immediate first response, including 9-1-1, law, fire, and EMS. The city is the next line of defense, if you will. What the city would do is then provide any support to the first responders if they needed. A lot of first responders have what we call mutual aid or automatic mutual aid agreements. So they already start getting those pieces in. So let's say, for example, you have very bad severe weather and a tree fell on an area that was housing 60 people, right? So the first responders, their job is to make sure everyone is safe, life safety first. As the city, you all would make sure that those folks have shelter and food and a place to go as soon as you can. If you cannot do that and you need assistance, you would reach out to other cities, or you would reach out to us, and we would provide you with support to bolster support, not actually come into your city and do that work. So each of the cities need to do the same work that we at the county level need to do. And so we would be doing this, usually our job is to be doing this for multiple cities at the same time. And then if we can't do that work and if we need resources then we would go to the state and then there's the regional state and then if the state can't get that done, then we would go to the federal entities. Next slide. So there's really the big difference between what we as Department of Emergency Management do versus responsibilities of each of the city. So for a city response, it's local emergency response, local emergency response, communicating with your communities, understanding what resources you may need, may not need, and supporting your vulnerable population and any infrastructure management. We at the Department of Emergency Management would then coordinate county-wide, set up the Department of Operations Center, Resource Allocation. So sometimes during a disaster, when you all need five of something, everyone else also wants five of something. And we may only have ten total of something. And so making sure that those resources get distributed throughout the county, that is something that we would do. We also liaison with the state and the feds to make sure that they are providing us with adequate assistance, public information, we can always coordinate public information campaign through our joint information system, and then any policy level support that you need that affects us collectively at a county level. An example of that would be COVID-19. Next slide. Next slide, perfect. So that is what we can do as city, county, first responders. We do need every single citizen in San Mateo County to prepare for emergencies. First is understanding where you get your alerts. Please sign up for SMC alert. You can go to the website listed to go to SMC alert. Prepare a emergency kit that lasts you 72 hours. In a massive earthquake, we're not going to have enough first responders to actually respond to everything that's going on and local governments will need some time to get up, get ramped up and going and we may not have resources coming in till 72 hours. We do want to eat individual in the county to prepare for 72 hours. What that means is food, medication, water, some clothing. If you have a pet supplies, some administrative documents. For example, if you're in a fire, you may need your social security number, your property insurance. These are important things to have copies of in your go bag. And then talk to your family and make sure they all know what the plan is. It seems like a lot. And most people don't want to think about themselves being in a disaster or an emergency. But I have done this personally. I, when I first started 10 years ago, and I up, I up my go-bag every year, it literally takes 20 minutes to do this. It's very much similar to preparing to go on vacation, except you have food and water. It's kind of like camp going on a camping trip, making sure you have food and water as well. So given our risk profile, it's really important that we focus on the grassroots movements, moment of making sure our communities are prepared to be resilient themselves and also help each other during a large scale emergency. Next slide. Thank you. Thank you so much for your presentation. At this moment, I don't know if anybody on the dies has any comments questions? Sure. Thank you so much. I guess one question I have. We mentioned like a scenario where 60 people need to be housed. Would that be... My impression is that's usually just a hotel because there's not... It's not mass shelter. It's like 60 people who need a place to stay. Or would that be a sheltering situation where you'd have to open an emergency shelter? Or... So it would depend on the city and what the city would do. Mass sheltering is back in style now because the hotel was really for during COVID times. It is very, very, very expensive to do hotel-ing for that many individuals. And it also depends how long they need it for. And there's a lot of nuances around if you put someone up in a shelter versus in a hotel. Okay, I mean one question I asked how many beds does the county of San Mateo have ready to go right now? Like in terms of mutual aid, I mean, we said we needed to have 60 cuts, 60 pillows, you know, sanitary supplies. How many beds does the county have on inventory? Just like, let's say we needed it tomorrow. Yeah, so that's a great question, vice mayor. We actually don't do sheltering. We would get our human services agency to assist with the sheltering portion or Red Cross to assist with that. We do have some cuts and some supplies, but they're not nearly enough for all the cities. Yeah, thank you. I mean, one of the issues I see us having like in a mass disaster is talking to the right cross, they have 6,000 beds for the greater Bay Area that could be half of San Jose's need. San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, and I've been just asking to verify, it's not like there's a magic solution to this. The county does not have these beds that they can just shoot our way and would be good. I know that HSA does have some of these supplies. I don't know the exact number, but I can find out and get back to you. I'm pretty sure I was told the number 50 or so in the entire Santa, sorry, San Mateo County. So I don't have any reason to doubt that number. I just, you know, I think when we're doing emergency preparedness, sometimes there's the instinct to say, you know, in a big event like an earthquake, somebody else is going to come in and they'll have resources that we can borrow, big steal, whatever. And I guess my concern with these Palo Alto is that it's very clear that you know Fredwood City, San Mateo, Foster City, everybody, half moon, San Mateo County is going to need these resources. It's all like we're going to be able to just ask and snap our fingers and they're, they're going to magically appear. And right now with the Trump administration and FEMA, I have no confidence that there's going to be support of the foot. Anyway, just thank you so much for coming by. Thank you. I believe we have a comment from Council Member Amriqa. Was it Carlos? Okay. Yeah, thank you for your presentation. I just want to make an observation that I think over the years the county, the mental part, fire protection and the city have worked fairly well and I'm sure that will continue. We haven't had that many emergencies per se but I think there's always been fairly good communication and I think that's always very important to do that. And I did have one question on, well, a couple of questions. One, because we are right here on the border with Santa Clara County. Some years ago through the JPA, I joined Power's Authority that deals with the flooding and stuff. I help to convene a gathering of people from both sides of the creek because I don't remember the specific situation but there had been a case where because you know the emergency is organized by counties, right? So you handle San Mateo County. And then there's another entity in San Acarac County. And so for us, that doesn't always work. And like I said, I don't remember the specific incident, but it was almost like it became a bureaucratic thing that we were right next to San Acarac County. And that we had to go through City and they had to check over there and then they had to check back and then it's like you know so I guess my question is and out of that meeting I think several things evolved including a current and maybe the fire chief remembers that it's got this long name there's the you know you know what I'm talking about when you come out of the administration. You know, key multi-agency coordination yeah yeah. You know which includes both counties at least here because that that was really of concern to us some years ago and I know I experienced you know, trying to communicate and it just like, you know, it's a point that sometimes people lose confidence in the government because the figure like, well, you guys are just talking all the time. And, you know, so, um, but, you know, some good things came out of that. And I assume that obviously that's still going on. But, But is there some formal agreement between San Mateo and San Acara County emergencies that at some point if need be like we could tap into Santa Clara County? Yeah, how does that work? How do you guys handle that, you know, county to go? Particularly border areas. I guess we're not the only place, but we're definitely one. You know, that's... Yeah, that's a really great question. Council member, I really appreciate it. So we, the San Francisco, San Francisco, the Keto Creek, multi-agency coordination or MAC is what we call it. We sit on it. I believe there's folks from City of East Palo, do Santa Clara all sit on it. And we, right now, since not too much is going on, we're more on an email thread. But when there is storms, we are able to get on a call together and talk about the streams and all of those different things that would make a difference whether that's King Tide or other nuances from a climatological perspective. So that collaboration, thank you so much for setting it up. It's now still ongoing and we communicate regularly. In terms of Santa Clara, we are pretty good partners. I am very close with the Santa Clara Office of Emergency Services, Director and their second in charge as well. In fact, their second in charge and I went to the Naval Postgraduate School together for Homeland Security. And so we communicate well right now we are actually starting having those conversations at a regional level. San Francisco,, San Mateo, and Santa Clara for talking about super bowl planning. So that's about to get started. So when there are regional things, we do talk to each other. One of the things you'll know is that there's a lot of aid that comes our way, whether that is, and the fire chief will talk about it, whether that's fire, law enforcement, emergency management. If something happened in Marin, there is a program where we would just send our people to help people in Marin or Santa Clara. So pretty good robust partnership going on right now. I would assume that the structure also works for hopefully won't happen. And I don't think it would flood anybody if there was an earthquake or what that group. The structure would continue to work. However, if there was a regional earthquake, everyone would, all of our resources would be fully used up. So we would need resources from other parts of the state and other parts of the country. And so emergency management, this mutual aid system works really well when there is one city or one county affected. Even if it's regionally, it still works. However, as you notice during COVID-19, that system completely breaks down because it's a global thing and there's only limited amount of resources. Yeah. And just not a curious, my last question is to do with the fact that so the county is responsible for unincorporated areas. To say fair oaks because they're basically an urban, they're like a little city. So do you basically just take over the of fair oaks along with the sheriff or I'm just curious. Yeah, so we are responsible for emergency management functions in unencorpagniaries. That they would set up something in fair oaks. Correct. And have the ability to give orders, if you will, or, you know, I'll just curious. We do more of the coordination. For the coordination. So, again, law, fire, you know, HSA, shelteringing all of those functions are done by specific agencies where more of the coordinating entity. So, um, So who's in charge of arrow in a case of emergency? I guess that's my question. Emergency coordination would be us. So for the entire operational area, we are responsible for emergency. No, but I mean the difference is like for us here. Yeah, we'll set up our own correct to man here with the police with everybody to give quick response. I'll just curious how it's handled. It would be the same that we we as counting. You would say correct. Okay, that was my yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have any more questions or comments from the other council members at this moment? Okay, because I do, but okay, this is actually something that I don't think has been mentioned yet. I don't know if it will actually be mentioned later on in the rest of our city session. But we've been talking so much about natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes. How preparedness are county to respond to a massive power outage? That's something I would be interested because, you know, at any time it would be quite inconvenient, right? But I'm thinking about, you know, close to, you know, or springy already summer. So how well prepared is the county in helping us, in case something like that were to happen. Whether it's summer, winter, and the year. Yeah. A couple of years ago, East Pello also experienced a pretty severe power outage that lasted, I believe almost seven days. Many of your residents were without power, which basically means not having the ability to shower, have fresh food, access to all of those. So again, we do that planning specifically for the unincorporate areas for power outage. However, we are working very closely with PG&E and they have been really good partners in the last couple of years including bringing on extra equipment and pre-deploying them before emergencies. So last storm which wasn't a very big storm they had nine to ten crews in San Mateo County usually usually before that, it would have been very little. We are advocating on behalf of all of our cities, very consistently. And then one of the things that we're working on right now is understanding from PG&E what they believe critical facilities are. and we're going to take that data and then send it to all of the cities and basically ask the cities if you all believe those are your critical facilities so getting those critical facilities power first is really important and in terms of our community 72 hours our community needs to be prepared for 72 hours. We are working with our libraries to set up community resource centers where they have charging stations and our libraries have piloted this a couple times already and has been very successful both during heat events and also storm events. And so the community has a little bit of respite to come, charge their supplies to eat a snack or get information of where they could go. So these are some programs that we have been working on. Okay, thank you. I don't know if we have any more questions from other council members. I have a question. I don't know a few years ago, there was a civil grand jury report about our fuel and water supply. I guess we didn't have enough water for maybe more than a day. And we never have fuel for a certain number of hours. I'm not sure if that's been addressed yet, because I know we're still working on getting an emergency water supply. But what about fuel? It's safe. How could we get more resources to address our emergency fuel? Yeah, thank you, Councilmember for that question. There are, I'm not sure about the specifics of that grand jury report. However, we have made a lot of movement from having contracts in place for fuel and then we are also looking at putting out a master services agreement in the next couple of months to basically have more contracts because we can't hold everything on site so having more contracts so people can bring in those resources during an emergency or disaster. Good, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do we have any more questions before we move on? Okay, go ahead. Yeah, I guess one last question. One of the things, I got certified a couple of years ago, and one of the things I was really surprised by was the financial aspect of mutual aid. And for a cert, you've got to fill out paperwork because you want to get paid back. And my question, and I don't know if you would have an answer for this, but talking to various people, it seems like there's a real existential threat to the mutual aid from FEMA, kind of, and at the national level. What's going on there right now? And if there was an event is the federal government and FEMA ready to step in and actually fund all of this mutual aid? Because I mean, my impression like if we set trucks in search and rescue down to Southern California in the recent fire that was all compensated by FEMA and if they pull that funding our search and rescue team number three I believe here in these policies probably isn't leaving the station if they're not going to get paid for their fuel. So I don't know if you have an answer for that, but it seems very concerning to me. It also kind of reinforces the idea that of self-sufficiency if we can't count on the feds at all. Absolutely. The political landscape at the federal level is ever-changing and it changes from hour to hour if not minute to minute. And unfortunately, I am not able to speak on behalf of what is occurring there at the federal level. However, I do completely agree with you, Vice Mayor, that we need to make strategic investments locally to make sure that we are prepared and that we have the ability to sustain any massive disaster. We are in a significant disaster prone area. And so, I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you. And I agree with your sentiments that locally, to invest more in emergency preparedness. Yeah, I guess I don't want to take forever on this subject. But you know, I have no doubt that if there's a local event like a flooding 60 people, we're going to be fine. There's tons of resources in this area. There's lots of other surrounding cities that can help us out. My concern is like the really big earthquake. And I mean, it's never hurts to be prepared for anything, but the local, you know, the localized events will be fine. But if there's an actual huge earthquake, you know, I think something else to keep in mind is when I was doing certification and you know, I know like this much about emergency preparedness, compared to the people teaching the course. One of the issues was they were up at the Paradise Fire and there had been a hurricane I believe that hit a few weeks beforehand even in you know what I'm quote good times when we had a functioning FEMA that was a challenge in terms of getting resources to paradise apparently. So I think a realistic scenario for us is that there's a hurricane that hits in the southeast, an earthquake in California that happens after that, and we very well may not have effective relief for weeks if not months. So maybe I'm being paranoid, but it seems like something we should be at least aware of. Thank you so much. I don't have any further questions. I was just making a comment on the power issue. I was going to mention, yeah, 2023, two years ago, when we had that long run. I remember that because this place was full when Lisa was the mayor then one of the things that really came out was very bad communication, very bad updating so that people were not literally in the dark. But you know, I think people want to know what's going on and they can understand if they don't know, then you know, it's the worst case. So I would say, I'm sure between you and our city manager, there's just a suggestion that contact PG&E again because personnel changes, you know, and things like that. And make sure that if anything were to happen, that they definitely call you and the city manager to give you the latest information so that it can be disseminated. Because last time that was a big breakdown. And Lisa at the time, she invited one of the very top people, EG&E, and basically said, you answered the questions, you know. I'm the mayor, but you answered the questions because, you know, people are looking to us on the council, but we had to limit it in very bad information and doubt. So they made problems through that. So anyone just saying that, you know, make sure that you guys are in the loop at least, you know, and then the rest of us can follow with that. So. Yeah, thank you for that. Just in February of 2023, we had a... I think it was Bay Area-wide. Some communities had no power for seven days. Here, we had no power for 53 hours. And as you mentioned, there was insufficient communication between PG&E and this city in particular, but also our neighboring Minle Park. So that meeting that then may or go, Shay, call along with Minle Park officials, we kind of have since had better communication with PG&E, they still have their kind of time period of, well, if there's a, it takes 24 hours to really get a thorough assessment of how long it will take them to fix, but they've been much better. I do intend to remain vigilant on them, particularly if we have a prolonged outage, but kind of their general understanding is that, you know, for that first 24 hours like they they're still an assessment mode. Well thank you very much for your presentation and for answering all these questions and we hope to stay in touch. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right next is our third third presentation. We have Heather Keller and Fire Chief Lorenzen from Enlow Fire. Hi there. I'm Heather Keller. I joined behind me by our Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen, who will be happy to come up and ask answer questions as well that are in his arena. My role is community risk reduction officer. So educating the community about their role in emergency preparedness, a lot of what we've heard about tonight, and we're able to offer a lot to the community in terms of them getting educated. Next slide please. And I think we can probably skip. I think we've talked through the risks to East Palo Alto that we prepare for. What we at Menlo Park Fire can do for residents. So again, more in chief Lorenzans area for questions that might come about this, but obviously we have our fire station located here in East Palo Alto. So preparing for emergency response services to the community, always ongoing, but including in the event of a major disaster. And then in my role, providing education to community members. So we have regularly held classes on first aid CPR Red Cross Ready, which is what you can do at your own home level to prepare for emergencies. As we've heard mentioned, I oversee our cert team. That is a more in-depth sort of Red Cross Ready Plus. That's about a 20 plus hour course where we prepare people for how to help themselves, how to help their neighbors, and then be part of our bigger Menlo Park Fire Cert team that can be used to help in events in disasters in the community. We also can bring our classes out to sites throughout East Palo Alto. We've done that at schools at businesses, senior centers. We can bring any of our classes to students, staff, parents, employees, things like that to continue to broaden our reach of those who are prepared. We also are, we have a sort, a sort trailer in the community also looking at bringing more supplies that could be used for our cert team. Also some water emergency food supplies that our cert team could help distribute in the event of an emergency. Next slide, please. What we can do for each other, the city of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park Fire. So what will help us for the city of East Palo Alto keeping us informed about potential risks, changing conditions, keeping your staff informed and educated on emergency and disaster preparedness and what their role will be. And then continuing to help us educate the public about staying prepared, staying informed. What Menlo Park Fire can do for the city is support the city's EOC when it's activated. And then also we have our cert team available to help provide support in lots of areas. But here are just a few examples helping with things like sandbags to prepare for flooding, helping with traffic control. We've went through additional training for some of our cert team members to help with those conditions, neighborhood canvassing, with staying within their role with things like light search and rescue basic first aid as we've heard mentioned earlier when our first responders are all busy dealing with lots of emergencies and the event of a big disaster. We have cert team members that can help as well. Next slide. And we've heard this mentioned tonight too, continuing to educate residents so they know what they can do for themselves. We've already heard about some of the apps so that they stay informed with SMC alert, Genesis to stay informed about evacuations, signing up for updates from City of East Palo Alto, of East Palo Alto receiving your newsletter that I know gives a lot of information any other important updates that get sent out. Getting educated with our classes I should also mention we have Leastos which is a class that we have taught in Spanish by some of our certain members who've gone through training and that is about an eight-hour course to help them become prepared at home and as I mentioned our first-aid CPR class. We also are always educating too about being prepared. We've heard about 72 hours. We like to say for those who have the space, the resources, all of that, if people can be prepared for up to two weeks, even better. We also understand that may not be realistic for everybody. Anything is better than nothing, but knowing there is that potential that they might be on their own for that amount of time. time and generally just having a plan for emergencies, what to know about evacuating, sheltering in place, how to be prepared for power outages, how to communicate with their And generally just having a plan for emergencies, what to know about evacuating, sheltering in place, how to be prepared for power outages, how to communicate with their family and friends if all communication networks are down, and making sure to consider those with access and functional needs, whether that is English as a second language, any sort of physical needs that people need to think about preparing for in an emergency. Next slide might be it. Any questions I can answer or chief Lorenz and can answer? Well, thank you very much for your presentation. I think it's very thorough. I'm going to turn it over to see if anyone on the dice has any questions or comments at the moment. Okay, chair. You know, one of the things, thank you for presentation. I got cert certified back in 2023. It was, I think, three eight hour days. It was a great course. And then I also took a first date in CPR course on that. You know, one of the one of the things that really stuck is the idea of staffing and how many people at any one time would be able to help in the case of emergency. So this might be more a question for the chief but if you could speak to the capabilities of the fire department you know let's say we have a 6.8 earthquake how many personnel are working at any given time in East Palo Alto if we had a massive earthquake and say you know, collapse buildings, multiple sites of disaster and if you could just speak a little bit what the capability here are. Sure. First of all members of the council for the record Mark Lorenzo and Fire Chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District. I will just say in advance even though it says menlo park on the side We are the East Palo Alto fire department. So to get to your question and to also hit on the importance of community resilience and resiliency and self-resiliency At our station two here in East Palo Alto. We have seven people plus a battalion chief, so eight really on duty at any one point in time, in the event of something significant, like an earthquake. That's all we're gonna have here. And they will be quickly overwhelmed with the first emergency they arrive on, which gets to the point that I think a number of people have talked about and probably the very biggest priority I would say in preparedness is starting in the home or in the household or the apartment and making sure we can do as much as we can to prepare our community to be able to, whether 72 hours or longer be able to take care of themselves. So really significant challenge challenge. Obviously in a wild land fire, mutual aid is easier to get in a large earthquake in the Bay Area. We're not going to be getting help from anywhere in the Bay Area for probably days. We'll be relying on help coming from the outside to the inside. Yeah, it was sobering that and it's sobering now just realizing that if we had a bunch of collapsed buildings, there not a whole lot of would be happening. Because the same thing would probably be happening all over the Bay Area and again, you know, resiliency and preparation on the local level. One of the things and I could talk about this because it was a really interesting course, but one of the things that you just thought of in the case of an emergency, there's these really long crowbars that are used in emergencies to lift heavy items. I think for a lot of the emergencies, please, you either have them or you don't, and we probably are luckier here in East Pawl because there's a lot of construction workers and so we could probably scrounge them up pretty easily. But it's just something like that. If you know, people are in a collapsed building and you don't have the, even if you have the expertise, but if you don't have the equipment, you're kind of out of luck. And I think that's something, you know, in terms of preparedness, there's a whole lot of stuff that we have. I guess, you know, maybe just in terms of, because you are doing emergency response and It's beyond earthquakes like that's the most obvious one, but heavy smoke was an issue here and What what is the fire districts? You know if we were to say hey, we need 30,000 and 95 masks because there's you know 400 air quality because of wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Would you have the capability to like deliver that and be like, yes, we have the stash of N95s for this, you know, wood smoke that's pouring through a community and causing everybody to get sick? Yeah, the short answer is we don't have those resources or the ability. The county might have the resources, whether they're still left over from the COVID crisis or not, but in general, those won't be readily accessible for a very short term emergency like that. Oh. So I worked with the Bay Area or Quality District and all the health officers in the Bay Area, the 13 jurisdictions, one of which we have here. Dr. Kiss mit Bald, Baldwin Santana. So the recommendation when there's a large air quality event is actually to stay indoors and make sure your windows and everything are closed. Going outdoors, you are risking, there's a false sense of security. Usually, this is the only time doctors tell you not to exercise because you're going to take in smoke. That's really not good for you. And as chief would let you know that during a wildfire event, people out there, firefighters, they're not wearing an N95 when they're fighting the fires. So there is a significant effect on health with particular matter 2.50. But the risk gets reduced significantly if you can stay indoors and not expose yourself to outdoors. Because it's usually a short period of time. Okay, thank you, man. Health officer Sorry, this is very impromptu So yes our the top thing we would recommend is just try to stay out of the environment where this you know The particulate matter is and the smoke is as you can. Staying indoors, if you're running your air conditioners, having them, you know, not bringing in air from the outside, just kind of trying to recirculate what's happening on the indoors. Let's not also not, you know, if it's the wintertime or something, if someone has a fireplace, let's not burn fire, you know, things like that, really trying to mitigate the risk before we start jumping to, we're recommending in 95 masks and I mean, there have been situations where people are have to work outdoors and things like that. And there are cal OSHA regulations on when the air quality is at certain levels, you know, employers providing in 95s and things like that. And we can certainly help you out with that if you need it. But we don't have any masks sitting around any longer, either for the most part. And so I think the first thing we would recommend is again, try to get out of it. And then also to, it's not in short supply right now. It's not easy for everyone to do this, but you can go out and buy an N95 or K95 or something like that before we start, you know, kind of going into the county resources and requesting resources from other regions in the state. But it's... And then N95, for it to work, has to be fitted to your face specifically. So giving them out to the public when they're not fitted actually gives a false sense of security. And there is there are no N95s for children. We did run into this for the was it the paradise fire? It was the one in in Bude County where the smoke was just everywhere and there was bad particular there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there and get a lot of people out there play, we don't want you to go running. And I mean, things like that. And so it did make people feel like they were a little more protected and invincible. And they really weren't, especially if they aren't well-fitted and things like that. Thank you. I think I got to final wild tangent but it sounds like if we're going to have a supply like that it would just be for maybe staff who had to be outside for any reason we need to have the PPE to do it but thank you for that very thorough and in prompt to answer from our County Health Officer. Madam Mayor. Yes, right. My question has to do with search training and we have And we have nine apparently, search trained folks in this city. What can we do in conjunction with you to get those numbers up, to have those trainings try-lingual or by-lingual. I know we have a lot of Pacific Islanders in this community. I'll stop there and see if you can answer. Thank you. So yes, nine currently who are Eastpull out to residents. One thing to note though is we view our Menlo Park Fire Cert Team as one cert team. So we have our full cert team which right now is 50 plus people we are in the middle of our next academy, which should add another 20 to 25 people. And then we see that team as one team who can assist anywhere in our district. So just to keep that in mind that we would have available more people and our representative to in terms of languages and things like that. But yes, continuing to promote is great. So we try to be at community events. We promote in the East Palo Alto newsletter that goes out by email. So continuing to any opportunities that you see to help us promote these. I sometimes put flyers at places like the YMCA, things like that. So any opportunities that you know of in your community, where we can help educate and promote our classes and encouraging people to sign up is appreciated. And your classes are conducted how many times a year? It depends on the year. Currently what we have so right now our schedule is out, I do the whole year at one time. So currently we're doing two Sird academies this year. We can always add if there is more interest. We're currently doing Leastos, the Spanish, the class we teach in Spanish. Same twice a year. And then we have our Red Cross ready, roughly once per month. Stop the bleed is another class we do, that's every month, Red Cross Ready, that personal home emergency preparedness once a month, roughly once a month. Great, thank you. Welcome. So, I did have a question, so all of this sounds great, but I feel that sometimes are you know when we're in an emergency people might be acting in a different manner so might just jump right into it and some might be a little bit hesitant. I haven't heard anyone really define the Good Samaritan Law and I think it would probably be a good reminder maybe if we could have a brief review of what it is for those folks that are out there that In case of an emergency they do want to jump in but then they're a little bit nervous like I don't know if I should help or not What if something goes wrong and then I get playing for it So I think that's something that we overlook sometimes and maybe that's why sometimes we don't have as many folks as involved Helping when they could be helping and perhaps they need a little refresher. So what the Good Samaritan law means. Thank you. Sure. Yes, and we do talk about the Good Samaritan law in all of our classes and making sure people know that whatever is within their any training that they might have, whatever is in the scope of their role if it's done with good intent. So we do cover those topics in our classes too. Thank you. Yes, thanks for the presentation. So a couple of questions. Yeah, the subject of the third or even more for me, I think is the Red Cross. That can 2021, 2021, still in the pandemic. I know a few of us on the west side, we worked with the previous staff and I blanked out under names. But I think you came in after them, right? Right. So we worked with them to, in some ways pilot the Red Cross, make it simpler, the presentation. We did it on Zoom at the time, but it was really a good experience. And we consciously recruited tenants and then employees of Woodland Park so that they could communicate with each other and know that they were at least basically trained. So, and then I had volunteered to do a draft in Spanish and I got it started. And then there was a change over. My question is, is the Red Cross training now available in Spanish? Yes, we have done that in Spanish. Okay, well that's good to hear because I think promoting both of them in many ways you can get more people. And like you said, just being around different places, is there a minimum number of people you like required to do a little training or? They're really isn't it? I've done it. It's just getting a group of people and then get it. And people and we've done it for a hundred people. So that's what we did at the time. Yeah, so I'll work on that. I'll help, you know, try to get more people involved. And then definitely I'm sure you'll be there for a single and my event. We get about 5,000 people. Yep. That's a good place to recruit people for maybe the cert also. Yes, both there. And I did go through the list of Spanish. both list of insert are kind of longer. And but the third you still working on that for doing it in Spanish or. We're open to that if there is interest. Just keeping in mind too that right we would need to have eye personally don't speak Spanish. So as overseeing our cert team, we would have to come up with our plan for how that part works. And then in terms of the, you know, if there is an emergency where it is the fire district, the sort of calls in the cert people, right? Right. Does that include if people go through listos or they have to be cert? No. For as far as responding to help support the community in an emergency or disaster, that is cert only. Only cert? Why is it not with listos? I mean, whether they go through that. It's just not within the role of listos. That's not we follow the curriculum of listos. Yeah, that's true. That one is a more kind of, yeah, I remember now, that's more grassroots kind of just preparing yourself. Yeah, which is very helpful, but well, that's unfortunate because I was very well done. But anyway, I think it's very important, maybe this year, to finally do something in Spanish. I'm willing to volunteer with, you know, translating or helping with that. I've done that professionally in terms of translations. And there's many people that can help with reviewing it. Because I think there is a large Spanish-speaking population. And by the way, I think there are people here among the immigrant community, I mean other people too, but who in their countries, they actually have had experience in doing this kind of emergency work, but the barrier is the language. And so I think we could capture some of them who then can be like leaders in their... So anyway, you know, I'll set up a meeting with you because I want to help with that and I think that can increase the number of people having more. And then I have one question for the chiefs. So, no, you know, discussing like this mutual help, agreement is which most of them are already sort of in place. But I know that you guys have a building, a big building here. That's right. Like the Psychological Hunger Program, right? Yeah, the warehouse, yes. Yeah, the warehouse. So do we have some agreement with us, the city formal? Because I know some of the questions have been, I think, rightly so, about supplies, you know, different types of supplies that the city could have. Have we made some agreement with you to be able to store them there? Is there some point or use space, with a lot of space around. Yeah, that's spaces, houses are urban search and rescue team and all of the equipment in there. So there's no room for, yeah, there's not really space for that there. But yeah, that's also a nice thing here is that we happen to have that resource right here in East Malato, so should something happen. Obviously, we need bodies to be able to use the equipment, but that is that team that we send out across the entire United States with very, very specialized equipment. That is a plus. Thank you. Well, that's there. And then in terms of rescue or evacuation, if there were to be a need, I know that at some point and I think you still have it but be able to use the water so we're right next to the bay in order to evacuate emergency, some people or whatever or is that only used for what is that used for because I know that there's been training there. One time I've been into a whole bunch of fire people. I'm like, where are you? We have, yeah, we have an airboat and a couple other boats that we use, usually for kite surfers or somebody who gets stranded out on the mud flats. So we certainly do go make rescues in the bay. Generally, I haven't heard of it being used for any kind of evacuations. I mean, that would be a challenge. It would be a very few at a time, but we, if we were in a situation like that where it could work, we might do it, but we don't have a specific plan related to evacuations like from cooling landing or anything like that. Yeah, I'm just thinking of the worst case scenario sometimes. Sure. Earthquake, you know, the freeway, everything shut down. That might be the only act that's in here. We have access to the water. Right. And some at least coordination with the ports, I guess, with CD and South Sun, I don't know, whoever's got ports, some arrangement to be able to, and I'm thinking more like, you know, spray all people, elderly people, people, and disabilities, people who would need to get, to get out of here to get some, something, you know, medical, whatever. So, I know it's all resources and money, but as long as we're right next to the Bay, on the one hand, it's a threat to us. On the other hand, it's a way to get around if, you know. Absolutely. Our infrastructure is going to likely be destroyed. So getting through on streets and I think you will find in a big earthquake situation. A lot of the resources will come in via boat. And we may be getting people out that way also. And then just one thing, just to touch on a question that was asked about having nine cert members here. Our goal is, I mean, cert is kind of the hallmark, right? But we would do anything to get people just more prepared tomorrow than they are today, whether it's Red Cross Ready, hands-only CPR, whatever it is you can muster. And we also realize that all of our communities are a little bit different. And probably in East Palo Alto you have a lot of members of the community here that are working three jobs just to pay their rent and they don't have time for a big program like that. So if we can do a couple hours with them and make them resilient with themselves, and if they happen to help somebody else out too, that's really our goal is to figure out how we can partner with you, to meet the needs of your community, and it's just an incredibly diverse, wonderful community, and not everybody has the same resources to be able to to participate in that. And you know, on the surface, just one last thing is I know I mentioned nine, but I understand there are more, it's just that they don't live here. For example, the clinic, I thought the clinic has a whole bunch of people, maybe I'm wrong now, but at some point, that they had some of the employees certified, but obviously, you know, they don't live, they don't live in the community or... And we do, our training is open to anybody who lives or works in our district. So nine right now is the total period whether they work here or only live here or whatever. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah. And we do ask people to stay current. That's part of it too. So people might in the past have gone through our cert academy. But we do require that they continue their education so continuing to take our classes to continuing to be involved in trainings and things like that so that list that I have our current team is because they've continued their education. That's what happened. Thank you. Well thank you very much. I don't know if council Member Lincoln has a question at this point. No, I know. Okay, what the... Okay. Yeah, thank you. Having taken a bunch of the courses, they're incredibly valuable. You know, it's also like you come out of there thinking, well, I learned something, but there's so much more to know. And the instructors are incredibly knowledgeable. A lot of them have been on site at places like Katrina and other disasters and have done some real hardcore emergency response. So our city staff are on your badges that you're an emergency responder. I would encourage all city staff to get started certified. Would that be something you'd be able to set up with our city staff? Yes, we could do that. And how long would that be? Would it be like it's a 20 hour course so you could come in? We can do it in whatever way if that's over, you know, three hours at the time or three, eight hour, three, seven hour days, whatever works. Yeah, it would seem like it would be good for city staff to take the course even just to understand a lot of the things. I mean, how do you use a fire extinguisher? You know, like that was a fun part, putting up fires. I guess is there a one of the things you'd be a certain member? And I've always thought that there was an emergency. I'm not a paramedic, I'm not a doctor. I'm not terribly, I don't, you know, my back would probably go out if I was lifting heavy objects, but I'm really good at knocking on doors, which seems to be kind of like a huge part of the cert teams to go chuck on neighbors like senior citizens or folks who are homebound of any sort just making sure they're okay. I think one of the weaknesses of the cert program it's a really big commitment. It's three, eight hour days and you know it's a big commitment. I think it would be nice to have a program that was a little bit more than just the emergency, you know, get ready type thing but something that wasn't a three-weekend commitment where you may be just teaching people how to check on neighbors and get organized where they're not necessarily full on certification, but they're going to be incredibly useful. And more importantly, they know that in the case of an emergency that, hey, I can go, I can do this part. I can organize my block and be part of the emergency response. And more importantly, I think also realize that, hey, nobody's coming to help. Nobody's coming, you know, you can't presume that there's gonna be somebody taking care of your neighbor who just lost power, it is 85 years old and homebound. So that's just more of a comment. I guess, you know, two questions. I don't know if this is, you'd be the right, do we have an evacuation plan, freeze-pawalto? In case of like, you know, playing crash we evacuate to the town. I'd be more chief blue or chief. I don't know if that's coming up later in the OK, that's coming up later. I think it's coming to the town. I'd be more chief blue or chief. I don't know if that's coming up later in the, okay, that's coming up later. I think it's coming up later. And I think that if we're done with these questions, we are thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you so much. I think that our next presenter might actually answer some of the questions that you were asking right now. And I believe our next presenter would be Mr. Jones much for all of you that have presented so far. The information has been very valuable. and also thank you to all of our constituents that are here also listening, participating in that matter. Thank you. Okay. As you get older, as you get older, you kind of certain things you can't do as much as you used to do. So I'm here to talk about building blocks for community preparedness here in East Fal Alto. I basically want to look at, introduce myself of those that know me, My name is Robert Jones. I am a sir trained but not certified. And there's a about maybe 40, 50 people in this community, I know at least 10 that have went through the certain training but have not been recertified through the district. So the nine is potentially could be close to 40, 35 or 40 people. I want to talk a little bit about some of the building blocks that I see our group see as important, kind of put into place before, during and after a disaster. And then I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we have done. then focus on a little bit about some possibly next step. As a group, our purpose is to we know that often individuals and neighbors are ill prepared when a natural disaster happened in the community. So, Repack or the Res East Palato community team that group that I represent, is a group of trained and spontaneous community emergency respond response volunteers that as we know that will emerge when there's a disaster, people just gonna come out of the world, because we are helping kind of individuals here in this community, when there's an accident or when there's something that needs to help, people will come out. So there's gonna be a lot of spontaneous volunteers in that realm. Our guiding principle is to help residents increase confidence, validate a validation of knowledge, and also respect from our net respect from peers. Our motto at within Repack is being involved is part of being prepared. Being involved is part of being prepared. So that means no matter what level of preparedness you may enter into the system through the Fire Department, you may not necessarily keep everything up, but you are on your way of being prepared for a disaster. There are overcoming these, overcoming, the nervousness that people have when a disaster actually happened. I stay up at night wondering about what would happen at around five o'clock in the afternoon. When traffic is coming through our communities, there's gonna be gridlocks. And so each section within the community, part of the community is gonna be isolated from each other. So that's where, from my perspective, the next slide, where our group come into play. I'm gonna talk a little little bit about what we think and think about in terms of what happened before disaster should happen, what happened during and what happened after as volunteers. The activity that we looked at the folks on before disaster years is the education part. It's very important that those that can shoot become educated on how to get prepared for disaster. The knowledge is power, will be power. We also focus in on neighborhood action planning. And there's five different areas that we really focus on. I'm highlighting only three of them here today. Block-to-bock assessment of our neighborhood, that means taking a team of people, search of spontaneous volunteers in our group, to go on and calm us our neighborhoods. There may be situations, houses, people that are seniors and disabled, live. We need to know where they are Be just because when there's a disaster They're gonna be the last one and want to be able to get up and run out of house So someone needs to know where they are someone needs to know that that they may need help Assisted in some form or fashion We also want to, is in the process of looking at building, building, building, building, building, building, building important. That means identifying locations within the city that can house people doing emergency. And those resilience hubs need to be built out. And when I mean by built out, that means that they need to have, in some cases, maybe they may need to have generators for if the power goes out. Especially if people are coming for shelter, to camp out for a while while or even recharged their battery. There needs to be a power generation at that particular facility. There needs to be food and water stored at those facilities. Just because when people come, there will be some food or water available to them. And then there's other things that we need to talk about that should go into those resiliency hub. And in our group, we have identified six different distinct areas here in East Palo Alto. And we think and feel is though, a base upon an arteries that's going through the cities that those six areas like the woodside, like the gardens, like Illinois Street, like Palo Alto Park, like the Kevin Ars area, think about it when there's grid lot right here, and you can't get through. Each one of those neighborhoods needs to be resilient, and need to have, being able to withstand, not being able to communicate or get past the Bay Road or University Avenue to go anywhere. They need to be a residency spot. We have started identifying those locations. We need to equip those sites as a safe radios. Because each one of the sites are act that should act as a hub, and they should act people will, if they know they exist, they will go and visit those particular sites. We need to continue to do training and exercise here before a disaster happens. Also, we need to look at activities to focus on during a disaster. Action first, as we need to at first have the understanding that we need to take ourself, take our family, and then take care of our neighborhood, our community. Voloters can fan out as a assigned in assigned areas to do a windshield assessment of the neighborhoods that's the volunteers. It can be served, it can be spontaneous volunteers, but they need to be organized to make that happen. First aid, maybe need to administer first aid, put a band aid on or trying to stop the bleed that's part of getting the training again to know how to do that. Also begin to support the first responders, provide critical support to the local fire police and the MES, EMS team doing a disaster. Next slide. So all of those things are very important in building up the hub. After what the activities are focused on after a disaster, we need to determine short recovery, in terms of how do we need additional mass care or sheltering. We need to figure out for those people that are in the shelter how to get them to places, maybe get to Stanford or some other critical place that need to go. All that needs to be mapped out and all that need to be ready to go when they're after a disaster. Provide integrated mask care and emergency services. There may be some emotional and psychological counseling that needs to take place. Hopefully the goal is to have that in the hubs, but it may not be able to get them in there before doing an ask for earthquake. It may have to do be support them afterwards. And mitigation activities such as assessing and understanding risks and the vulnerabilities in our community. Next slide. So these are some of the consequences we have. The ARGO repack have a compass over the years. Since 2015, EPEC and repack, disaster preparedness group has been engaged in various disaster preparedness and relationship building activities. The metrics next to it shows that disaster preparedness, training laid by Millen Park Fire Protection District, measured by the number of people attending the class. We had our target of 600, roughly about 2% of the population in East Waldo. We have achieved that goal of educating to be read cross-ready and before be read cross-ready, the class was a get ready class was a female class. We had 380 people that flowed through the system. We have identified six distinct neighborhoods in East Palata, as I mentioned, by mapping the city. We have targets six, and we have achieved that targeting goal of six. We have tested MRS radio ranges and clarity in each of the six neighborhoods in East Palo Alto. We have targeted six and we only complete so far the actual four neighborhoods. Our goal is to complete those, the other two mapping radio clarity in the other two areas. We have set up a community radio communication hub, ELC at Faith Missionary, back to church. And again, this is not the fire district, not the supply, the police department is the community-based driven kind of organization where people will feel comfortable in going. So that's, we have, we look to six, but we only have one right now that we have identified and have been practicing. We have a radio, a ham operating system that we got from the county several, about years ago that is being used for that particular purpose. We have conducted the FRS radio training exercise, live by John Mosby, who is a ham radio expert. We had targeted three classes, training classes with ham, and we have completed those three. Our repet met with other nonprofit organizations regarding joint venture around disaster preparedness activities for youth and seniors. So far, we have with targeting six nonprofits here in the city of East Falato, the partner with, and we have actually had two. One, next slide. One of the things that we are very excited about now is to work with to start a youth, a team preparing this program, emergency preparedness program. There is interest in an organization called YCS, the Youth Service Center. We have talked about what that will look like. We have a drug draft of what that should look like. And they're excited to work with the fire district, if this you hear, this you hear, to get that going. We also have talked with the senior center. We talked to Ms. Grander about Ms. Grant, and we have talked about working with them to bring other services that seniors need. And in doing so, hopefully the senior center can help us with our neighborhood assessment in terms of understanding and identifying word-o-seniors live, word-o-disableds live, because when and it's asked to happen, they are going to be the last one left. It reminds me of the past, out of the inner fire, where in the power of safe fire, where a couple of seniors got lost their life, because they couldn't get out. They was wheelbound. And so we don't want to make sure that that doesn't happen here. So that's our goal as a group. Again, I want to say thank you for allowing me to come. I hope I under my seven minutes. So any questions? Now thank you, Mr. Jones, for your presentation. You might have answered this question already. What would be some other volunteer opportunities other than what you just mentioned for the YCS group of young students that are interested in forming that, I guess, youth emergency preparedness. Right. Group, I guess. I think the volunteer efforts I think around finished understanding and building out and thinking about how to staff up a man up or identify what we need to have any resiliency hub because I think that's going to be a key to in our city. Right now I think the Red Cross may have identified two places. I know Faith, Mr. Baptist Church is one and I think the senior center is the other. Both of those facilities have an opportunity to have cooked food there. You have also enough space where you can maybe house 50 to send five people or maybe more. Those are the kind of places that are going to be important. And if we can strategically have them in the six identified areas that we have identified in the community throughout East Palo Alto, that would be ideal. So there's a lot of work to be done to bring those other two or all six of them online. Okay, thank you. Do we have any more questions because I do, but I can let other folks go ahead and ask questions or comment. Yeah, thanks for the presentation. I had kind of a clarifying question maybe between you and the fire chief or fire chief good answer. So I know I participated in one, maybe two of the kind of testing the radio communication so that, you know, if the cell phone, if everything goes down, we know that the ham radio is the ultimate way to communicate it, if everything is out, but in between there are these radios, right? Which people use. They use them all the time for events and things. Could you? I foresee people themselves, in addition to these organized efforts, we know that when things happen, people will use their own networks, family networks, neighborhood networks, professional networks, to help each other, which is good. And so if, say people want to use their radios, what is their situation in East Palo Alto in terms of being able to communicate, yeah, because there's some obstacles, but I understood that the new fire station, which now it's a few years old, but, you know, it has this great antennas or it's a lot more capabilities. and I don't know if that helps to transmit the radio. So if somebody's in the garden, they want to have a relative who lives over in the cavernor area or any areas in the city where people on their own are going to try to communicate. Could you just quickly summarize what the situation is? Obviously people people would have to do more. But I know that just having the radius themselves may not help you and so, but it could help you. So, well, how does that work? Just briefly, you know? Sure. There's different type of radios. There's the FRS radios, the GMRs radios, and then there's a ham radio. The ham? Aside from? Aside from the HAM radio, because I know that's a powerful one. That's a powerful one, but visualize this. If we are able to create these nodes or hubs in each one of those areas, and then visualize that you have people in, say for example, one node is a faith missionary and a Baptist but I know what that is on weak street in a weak, weak, weak area. You have a ham operator in that operating eye that node at faith missionary Baptist Church. You have sections within that weak street area that are identified. Those sections, whenever the disaster, those section leaders go out and do the windshield assessment in that particular area, they report that information back to Faith Missionary Baptist Church, who then can, because there's a ham operation, operating communication device, then can if you need to go to the city police department or need to go to the fire district, that information can get reported back. Because when it is disaster, what happens? Communication is going to be key. You got everybody up in the clouds, as I like to call it. You tell my the fire district, you got the city police, you got state, you got county, you got all those communicating each other in the cloud. But part of what they are responding to is either 911 calls, one call in, but we noted the Frisk board may be jammed on that. So how do other information get to the party? Through that mechanism of going up into the hubs with the county, with the hand operation, a high operating communication system, and then reporting out to the police or to the fire district, of what the assessment has been. Because we only got, as the chief says, we only got one for our truck. That's maybe seven folks at any given, maybe any given time. So they can't be everywhere, just like the police department. I'm not sure how many is actually in the field on a day-to-day basis, but they gonna be tied up and who's gonna go out and assess what else is out there? Who else is hurting? And that's part of this windshield assessment. That's part of these volunteer search folks and spontaneous folks going out making that assessment, calling that back into the community EOC and then that going out there other places because of the radio that everybody can get a ham operation license if they want to go and take and send it, think about $79 to go for a class, but not everybody's gonna wanna do that. So that's why the FRS rating is gonna be important and the communication, that information into a source that's nearby where they can reach, because not all FRS radios, there's a lot of limitations to that, so there's only. Yeah, so that's the part also that I was running. So let's just hypothetically say, you know, a family, and they have relatives or close friends in different parts of the city, and they buy these radios and something happens, and they just want to communicate with their family. At this point, they're not tying into the hub, they're not doing any help out in the neighborhood. They're just looking after the family. They want to use the radio. What are the obstacles right now? Or what? You know, that's probably something later. I don't need a lot of detail. I just want to be clear that it really is not possible to, if you're on the West side to communicate with someone in Kevin, no. Or are there radios that have that capability that you could literally then call and just, I'm just checking how you're doing because our phones are not working or not. And then, yeah, I guess that's my basic question. And yeah. There's two scenarios that happen from my understanding. Yeah, this one was same between the two of you. There's two scenarios. Even the ham radius out. I don't want to deal with the ham radius, just like the people who have this and say like Oh, I want to call and they do that or said If the towers are out radio You cell phone towers are out Then the other mode of communication it could be the FRS radios, but they have remote they have limitations You know you trees can stop their communication. That's that's what I'm using that nature, GMRS, radio, is a little bit more powerful. You can get a little bit more range from it. And they may want to use that as a backup as well. But you've got to have a license for that as well. Oh, I see. OK. All right. OK. OK. Thank you. Yes, generally exactly. And we're just to add a little bit to where men La Park Fire is currently in the process of updating our communications plan for how we work with our ham radio operators in the community. So yes, I think exactly what Mr. Jones has said about FRS radios. Yes, that's the one to one family communication, but pretty limited in terms of reach and having obstacles and all of that. So GMRS and Ham Radio where you have to have a license. And when you mention like the antenna, we have at station two. That is only once we're getting to that level of talking about ham radio. So yes. Thank you. I hope that was like clear as mud. No, that's good. Yeah, to clear out these different areas. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I don't know if we have any questions or comments from remaining council members Lincoln or Romero at this time? No. Okay. I did. I don't know if it was actually mentioned. I was going back and looking at the slides here. So where he talks about identifying locations. I was wondering if we have actually or or maybe this might come up later tonight, have we contacted the school district to see if they could actually be also a temporary location where we could house people in the event that we had to have some kind of evacuation? I do remember actually living through the 1989 earthquake and I do remember that they actually had cuts that were brought and I don't know if Mr. Breeker remembers as well. The earthquake of 1989 I was actually a six grader and I remember that the schools were open for that event. So I was just curious as to where we are now in the present day in terms of a partnership perhaps with the school district and other, I think other schools that are within our city. I haven't directly talked to the superintendent. I have talked to her indirectly about possibilities of that. So I think that's part of understanding and developing that community response. And it's gonna take a lot of work, I think in terms of understanding their capabilities and their willingness or evenness to make that happen. But it is on my agenda to do that. I have a comment on that. So I was speaking with the Human Services Agency, which focuses on mass sheltering. And it's recommended that we actually don't rely on schools because their main priority is to get students back in school. And they can't do that if there's a massive disaster where it's prolonged several days. So instead, we are looking at where can we house people if there is a crisis and we need to have shelters in place here that don't have to rely on the schools themselves. And we have all I think in terms of understanding the capacity of some churches there are some churches here in this community have a capacity like plank frances I I know Faith does. I know that St. John does. And there's, there's another church that can escape me right now. Maybe a rempass of Proto church, maybe have a facility. There are some places that need to be looked at and talked to the ministers and their appetite for the possibilities. So that's yeah. Would that be the case as well for the Boys and Girls Club that that couldn't be a place that we could use or the YMCA? We could use the YMCA. We actually got the Red Cross surveyed the YMCA and it was certified as a possible shelter. The restriction for the schools or like the limitations with the schools is because they're reliant on funding and funding comes from attendance and so that's why schools aren't typically the best option for long-term sheltering solutions. And I think with the Boys and Girls Club, I'm not sure if you chat with the Boys and Girls Club, but they do a good facility, and I'm not sure what their limitations are in terms of making that facility available, but that's on my agenda to try to get it on the stand on that as well. Okay, thank you. Council member, Rermann, I have a question. Comment, okay. Mr. March Vainin. Yeah, thanks Bob. It's been great working with you on emergency preparedness, organizing some of these seminars that have had, I think we had upwards of like 70 people at one of them. That was right after the storm. So there's definitely any in the community. I mean, I did some comments. I think one of my primary concerns is that, You know, talking to people who do this for a living, they say that somewhere between three and 10% of our population could become suddenly homeless in the event of a major earthquake. That's up to 10% of 3,000 people, but let's say 3% that's still what, 1,000. And we need shelters and we need to have a pre-prevision and we can't count on outside resources for it. And I think all the churches, boys and girls, club, YMCA, there's a long list of places we can look at. One of the other things, you know, when I was getting certified, the radio part of it is really concerning because, you know, if we don't have ham radios and we are out of power for two weeks or a month or I mean, imagine if a little wind storm can knock out our power for 58 hours, what's a 7.2 earthquake on the San Andreas fault going to do if it really impacts, you know concerned about clean water sewage, all that. I think, you know, we need to think about this ahead of time and hopefully it's just an insurance policy. It's never used. But boy, it would be nice to have these shelters prepervisioned if we need to know. You know, I think one of the complicated factors with shelters is that everybody in shelter and it's one comment was made by somebody of San Mateo County that, you know, you don't want to have sex a in a shelter with families necessarily and there's a lot of complicating factors with shelters that I know very little about but it's something that you know we can't just presume that it's you know put a bunch of cuts in a at the YMCA and we're ready to go with the shelter there needs to be training and and all that. That's just sort of commentary. But the other thing I'll add is that I was talking to Melanzelko from Manzanita works today and she's been working on regional shelters like in the area for families. And I'll make an introduction to the city for that, but it's something that, like some of these places can handle 150 people. It's not necessarily in East Palo, but it's not on the other side of the moon either in the event that we really need to tap into those and wanted to do in Santa Clara County. But thank you so much. I look forward to working with you, moving forward. And there's a lot of work to do, and I appreciate all the work you've done, because I think you've been carrying the torch in East Pal Alto for many years now. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Jones. I actually didn't have one more question. I don't know if this, I don't know if Mr. Bob can answer or somebody else. You know how we were talking about possibly using the water for evacuation as council member. Abriqa had mentioned earlier for the most vulnerable constituents in our community. Do we have some kind of joint agreement with the Paulalto airport as well? In case you're severe like life and death situation where we actually need to airlift someone to like a hospital. Have we ever explored that? Do we have that? I mean, I don't know. Because I mean, we are, those are other resources that, you know, we have in our backyard. I know that they're not part of our jurisdiction, but I know that we do work closely with their neighboring cities. So I don't know is that something that we have or could currently have or something that we can look into in the future perhaps? I don't know. Like who would answer that question? Well, I can give my opinion. I think that, take that last year, we had a couple of hot days. The county of San Mateo, I can see they gone, was issuing head water available. They went out and bought, I don't know, somewhere close to 200 cases of water, and they was distributed throughout the community. I think as a community or I say, I think that's where it importance of building out the hubs. So they can store water, not only for for emergencies, but they can also distribute for doing hot days as well to people like what the county did. So it becomes a rotational kind of situation. The water don't sit there for years. It comes in, it gets used, it gets stored. So just for an emergency and being able to replenish that, either the city replenish themself, replenish the water or work with the county to in their resources or to restock the water. I don't know. Thank you for the poll to agreement. We don't have one and I'm wondering if maybe fire district has explored that as an option or if maybe our community service officer is with if you have any history or knowledge about an agreement with that. Or maybe not an agreement just kind of the need for MediVax in this area. Yeah, I would just say if if there's a need for a Mediac, we generally are gonna do it via helicopter and they can land just about anywhere. So it probably wouldn't even be at the airport. Yeah, thank you. Just one last comment. You know, one thing I'm in the event of like something really bad happening, you know, mass casualties. where it kind of an overwhelming, major earthquake like you saw in Turkey, where thousands of people killed out of it, I think would be better than Turkey. I think one of the things that the city can look at is getting a list of, there's a lot of doctors and nurses that live in East Palo Alto. We're close to the Stanford to the Stanford Hospital and it's possible that they're not gonna be a work but having, you know, a pre-organized, and I believe there's insurance requirements and all sorts of paperwork that I don't know anything about. But, you know, if there is an event that if we were gonna be having emergency medical response, that there would be, like we would know who in the community, who is the MS trained, who is a nurse doctor, et cetera, and be able to get that set up. I don't know if that's something that other communities do. I don't know if I'm just, but it seems like it would be a good thing if we were in that sort of a situation, but maybe that's just beyond the capabilities or it's completely absurd. Paranide thinking that you'd have hundreds of casualties in a big earthquake. So I don't have the chief. If there's other communities, do they do that? Do you have a certain team, but then you also have identified medical, medically trained professionals in the community that can be called on in emergency? That's an option. I think that's gonna be the case in every scenario. And I think in a major earthquake, probably the best thing a city could plan for is a common location where people could bring their injured to. And because the reality is we won't be able to move around and you're gonna need to have some kind of common meeting point where people can come and receive care. So, and then if you have community volunteers, doctors, nurses, whoever, that's going to be the appropriate place. Do they have to be before in emergency like that? I mean, there's like liability or America, right? Is there anything you need to do ahead of time? Or if somebody shows them, is it, hey, I'm a doctor, I work at Stanford, but I'm, you know, not doing plastic surgery this in, but I can help people get, you know, dust out of the rice. Hey, I don't know. And just I know every time I find an airplane, there's something that says you can volunteer to help anyone up in the air. So there must be some provisions for that same kind of thing that we had talked about before. OK. Thank you. Is that where the good Samaritan law might fit into? Perhaps maybe in the gray area of it. I'm not sure if it's good Samaritan, you know, because we are, you know, in theory, you know, we have a higher level of training, so it's beyond my legal expertise to weigh in on whether that applies, but I'm sure there's something that applies in situations like that. Okay, thank you. There's one nurse, one of our nurse, and intern doctor that I know that lives here in Eastphal also, they have came to the disaster prepared, the workshops. And they informed both of them in for me that when there's a disaster that happened, their first obligation is to go to their place of employment, which is Stanford. They may patch up somebody on the way, but their responses to get there. So I think we can't really rely on that as much as being able to, as the chief said, find a place where people can be housed and then fight for you not a way to get them bus them over to where they need to go. Okay, thank you so much. I think we have one more comment. Yeah. And I think our maybe our city manager can confirm this, but my understanding is that since we have a clinic, you know, Family Health Services Network, a long name. I still think it's a community clinic because that is their basic function. Because they get federal funds, my understanding is that if an emergency is declared, they basically, by default, become like the medical center in some ways, which means they then, you know, connect with other resources. And because they do have some trained personnel, at least, you know, some nurses or some, that's what they do, right? And so I just want to double check that because at some point or one of the trainees I went, that's what they mentioned that the community health clinics throughout the country because they get federal funding and that is kind of one of their obligations in a say that, you know, and even if it's not their obligation, I feel like they definitely should be part of the network for this whole medical period and they could help with coordinating or whatever happens. But that's my understanding. So. Yeah. I'm not sure about the requirement. However, Ravenswood Family Health Center is part of our kind of network of organizations that are part of our co-ad, which Denise will touch on later. But I would like to find out. Yeah, I can check myself. I would like to find out if they have requirements and what is the role in case of an emergency. So let's say an emergency happens. What is your response? What do you do? We will check on that. I mean, like every city employee is at, you know, does say an emergency happens, what is your response? What do you do? We'll check on that. I mean, like every city employee is a disaster service worker. I don't know if employees of the health clinic have that same requirement, but we will check. I do know that the clinic is a partner and I imagine in an event of an emergency, any any admissions nurses or other staff or trained would activate. But yeah, you know, I'm just thinking following what Mayor was saying in some ways that they could be a place where some people could volunteer granted if the doctors may responsibilities go to the hospital, but there could be other people, former health, retired people who, you know, could be of assistance versus just anybody showing up and say I want to help. But, you know, the clinic would have a way to take them in, organize them, be of some service. I have a comment. So the San Mateo County's Emergency Medical Services Department has that. Actually, I think they serve that function for the entire county. So there is a list serve that any health professional can opt into, where they will serve as a volunteer when an emergency happens. The emergency medical services department will dispatch those who are selected on that volunteer list, and they'll come from anywhere throughout the county. So I don't know if that's the function necessarily of the community clinics, but I know that we have that available as a resource through San Mateo County's emergency medical services. Yeah, like I said, whether they're required or not, they have a great facility, they have a lot of people are all in the medical field and it's a great resource that we have. So we need to use it, whatever's going on. So yeah, I appreciate that information, but I still want to focus on our clinic here. Yeah, I mean, I think God help us if we're ever in a situation. We're, we're, we're talking some zombie apocalypse, you know, type situation, but I mean, type situation but it doesn't hurt to think about what happens if there's like a hundred people with broken arms and legs and they're not gonna get to stand for it because of you know everyone's going there and they're not gonna be triaged until three days after that but well thank you and that's all. Well, thank you very much everyone for your presentation and I think we have one more left by your very own Denise. Thank you. I'm at home. Thank you very much, everyone, for your presentation. And I think we have one more left by our very own Denise. So I will hand it over to you, Denise, to hopefully bring us home. Yeah, I can wish my sister happy birthday. Today's her birthday. Oh, happy birthday. Thank you. All right, we'll just wait for James to put on the presentation. Thank you, City Clerk. Good evening, Honorable Mayor and City Council members. My name is Denise Garcia, and I'm an assistant to the City Manager, and I'm presenting to you all this item on emergency preparedness. Luckily, we've heard from four amazing partners and presenters, and they've shared a lot of similar things that I'm going to share, so information might be a little redundant. I'm here with Keith Staff, who co-lead this work, so that includes Dave Santos, our captain and Elizabeth Lam, Community Service Officer from the police department. Here's the agenda for the presentation. We'll start with an overview of the program. We'll review what's already in place. They identified gaps and opportunities for improvement and are recommended priorities and budget. Finally, we'll ask for your guidance on how to move forward. The emergency preparedness programs goal is really to enhance the disaster preparedness and response for residents and all patrons of our city. Staffs proposed work plan, which I'll go in detail later, will help us strengthen our emergency preparedness and ensure we're ready for disasters. We're focusing on planning, improving communication, coordination during emergencies, and helping our community recover quickly. Before I share some of our work in emergency preparedness, it's important that I start by sharing the first line of defense is individual and family preparedness. Many emergency preparedness experts, which you've heard from all of our partners, shared that the basic rule of thumb is the first 72 hours on you. Because many city and county services will be impacted if a serious emergency occurs. Households and individuals should be self-reliant for the first 72 hours after a disaster. Essential supplies include drinking water, non-perishable foods, medications, emergency lights, hygiene kits, and much more. So again, residents must take initiative to get prepared. The city's efforts include the following. We maintain an emergency operations plan, which the last time it was updated wasn't 2011 and needs an update. We activate an emergency operations center and can declare an emergency. We can coordinate with multiple departments and other organizations, which include the partners that we heard from earlier today. We can co-organize community and staff trainings with Menlo Fire, which include CPR training, first aid, and even active shooter training, which isn't in Menlo Fire's realm, but some type of trainings we can have. Provide real-time updates through various communication channels to keep our community informed. On the next slide, you'll see that the Public Works Department supports emergency preparedness through several capital improvement projects. There's also a multi-agency coordination through San Francisco's CREG joint powers authority. I've listed some of the projects on this slide and more information in the report. And if there are any questions related to infrastructure or utilities, our public works director is on the line and he can respond. On the next slide, I'll show that we, these are some of the things that have taken place over the past few months. So, staff has spent a lot of time with information gathering, which included meeting partners and community organizations that currently work on emergency preparedness. We've also attended various community briefings and organizational trainings to learn best practices from neighboring jurisdictions. We've also utilized this information to develop a strategic work plan based on what is most important for a successful emergency preparedness program. We're using various communication channels to share updates related to the storm. We're also implementing a mandatory basic disaster training for staff starting in fiscal year 25 to 26, while currently requires staff to any new staff, I should say, to complete the training as part of their onboarding. Staff is also hosting quarterly co-ed meetings. These are the community organization's active and disaster. We're also looking through the EOC, which is our emergency operations center cabinet, and trying to see what items need to be replenished. We ended up finding out that there are some things that are outdated and so we're going to update them and we're working with public works to actually purchase a larger cabinet that can store more items. Although the city has a role in emergency preparedness, many external agencies provide essential support that we must utilize. Key partners are important because the city has limited capacity and expertise as a government institution. And instead, we value our partners who have the expertise to help support our community in the event of a disaster. It's really important to have those partnerships establish and connections made so that when an emergency occurs we have a direct contact that we can reach out to for assistance. The key step I believe in emergency planning is developing those relationships and this is something that staff has prioritized. After conducting this information gathering we've identified six major gaps in our program with opportunities for improvement. I've listed the first three on this slide and the following three on the next. First, we'll go with Update Thermalization Operations Plan. As I said, the last time it was updated was in 2011. So we'd want to work on updating this to reflect current risk and coordination strategies. It also doesn't have a crisis communication plan, which we'd like to embed into the emergency operations plan or create a standalone item just to support any of our communications. The second item is emergency training for staff. As Melvin mentioned, all city staff are disaster service workers and they need to feel prepared and adapt their roles if an emergency does occur. It's vital for them to learn the material and have reoccurring drills in order to practice that material that they've learned. So there needs to be an ongoing emergency training for staff. The third item is on increased cert participation, cert being the community emergency response team. Although it's not under within our realm, we want to help support Melo Fire who runs the CERT program by encouraging more of our residents to participate. So really the idea is just to increase participation with the focus on ensuring that we have enough diversity and representation of our city. Next slide. All right, the final three are here. So the first one being community outreach and engagement. We want to increase EPA's subscriptions to SMC alerts. This is the county's primary alert and warning system used to contact you during urgent emergency situations. Alerts can be sent via voice message or text to your email, cell phone or landlineline. So we just wanna make sure that we're encouraging our residents and not even residents, but just patrons of the city to sign up for SMC alerts. Staff also wants to propose promoting the Red Cross Sound the Alarm program. It's a pre-program where volunteers from Red Cross will go out and install free smoke alarms or test smoke alarms in our households here. We also want to launch an awareness campaign on the first 72 hours on you, encouraging residents to build 72 hour emergency kids. The next one is emergency supplies and emergency operation center readiness. The city does not provide emergency food, water and supplies for the public and instead recommends forming partnerships with local organizations for this type of resource support. The EOC Emergency Operations Center Cabinet needs restocking. As I mentioned, we did look at the cabinet and there were some things I needed to get updated, so we want to make sure that we are ready here within the EOC. The last item on this proposed project is emergency shelter planning. We have two approved shelters, the YMCA of East Palo Alto and the Faith Missionary Baptist Church. They both can house a total of 200 people. Right now we need to have formal agreements set and we need to clarify the usage of the various types of groups that can occupy these two spaces. As Mark or As Vise may have mentioned, we have to be careful of what kind of families or what kind of individuals can be located in these different shelters. And so we'll have to work with the the facilities to identify who can be placed where. We also want to some geographic diversity, so we'll look into other locations throughout the city where we can have them as approved shelters. I had a quick question in terms of that. Do you guys already have in place your screening process as to how you would identify those individuals that cannot be with other people that have small children or what have you. Yeah, so that actually is something that the Red Cross would assist us with. They're also the ones that do the surveying for us at the different facilities, so we'll work with that facility and Red Cross to outline what types of populations can be in the MOU or some sort of formal agreement. I'm assuming that we, sorry, if we have those registered offenders, they would actually up out right away. I'm assuming is that correct? Yes. They would pop up in the list. Okay. Good. Yeah. There's a whole training program for people who are running emergency shelters. It's the same thing. You get hemorrhageo, you get trained on how to run a shelter. I don't know anything about it But I know the training exists and it's also there's training for EOCs. There's training for you know, FEMA at least used to have Online training for a lot of these things. You can go as deep into this stuff as you want But yeah, part of it is you know the opening of shelter, it's not like the Red Cross would run at you would get the training from the Red Cross and people in the community would run the shelter. That's my impression. There's not unlimited Red Cross people out there who are going to just step up and help. All right we can go to the next slide please. All right and so although we have six identified proposed projects for this upcoming fiscal year we also just want to share that there are other things on our radar for future years. So one being emergency on-call contracts and equipment purchases, the second financial assistance for emergency equipment, third collaboration with local hospitals, and for long-term recovery and insurance awareness. We've mapped out the four quarters of fiscal year 25 to 26 on our work plan, which is also attachment one on your staff report. It's focused on the foundational principles of emergency planning, which include planning, organizing, equipping, training, and exercising. The first quarter's goal is really to just lay the groundwork by assessing current preparedness levels and identifying key gaps. The task being training and exercising. The first quarter's goal is really to just lay the groundwork by assessing current preparedness levels and identifying key gaps. The task and deliverables are an alignment with project number one, which includes updating the EOP and the communications plan, project two, which is on staff training, project six, which is on shelters, and project five on supplies. Next slide is this is for Q2 which covers October through December of this year and the goal here is to educate and prepare staff and begin community outreach. Task and deliverables are in alignment with project two again on staff training and project five on community preparedness. In Q3, the goal is on exercises and evaluation. TASC and deliverables are in alignment with Project II, staff training for community preparedness and six shelters. And lastly, in Q4, our goal is to solidify preparedness initiatives and plan for the next year. Task and deliverables are an alignment with project number two, staff training for community preparedness and increasing membership. All right. So we are proposing a $160,000 investment in the foundational areas that will help strengthen our program. And just to clarify, we're not asking for this amount now. Instead, we want your input on the prioritization of our projects and the budget request. Once we get your guidance, you will bring it back with the citywide proposed fiscal year 25 to 26 budget. And while I close the council off with this presentation, I want to leave you with these three questions that will help us with how we move forward. The first question is does the City Council agree with staff's proposed work plan? Again, this is on attachment one and on slides 11 through 14. The second question is does the City Council approve the budget proposed for emergency preparedness projects? And lastly, are there any other item City Council would like us to prioritize that fall under our jurisdiction? Your feedback is crucial for our next steps and with that, thank you and we are open to any questions. Thank you, Denise, for the presentation. I don't know if we have any council members at this moment that would like to comment or ask any questions. Or with a couple of thank you for kind of organizing all this in the framework. Yeah, so borrowing, yeah, I'm kind of borrowing a few concepts from the different presenters. I think they all did a great job in different areas. So the county and their little cycle presented the area of mitigation, which I feel I think for the city, one of the things that we need to do is look at the bigger picture to mitigate and thereby sort of prevent, hopefully prevent more damage, more harm in some future emergency. So for example, the area of retrofitting buildings. I think that I didn't really see that, but and it sort of came up, but I think having an idea doing a survey of what is the status of our buildings. To me, because, and I think the earthquake, she also mentioned that when I asked the question, right? So if we're able to retrofit some key buildings, that could potentially save lives in case of an earthquake. But if we don't do that, then, you know, well, then it'll create more harm, more people more needs for, more needs for the response. So it's kind of like trying to prevent instead of just responding. So anyway, that's one area that I think is important to include somewhere. Through the chair, we had a project a few years ago that did an assessment or a inventory of kind of the soft story buildings in East Powell. So are you talking about kind of looking at that list? Well, you know what I'm saying is this. We're standing in this building just for the sake of argument. We can do all these things that we're talking, which are great. But if this building needs retrofitting and and we don't do that, then something happens, look all the people who work here, then we're gonna be, so I'm just, I'm just gonna say, I know if we did a survey, great, but now we should take it the next step and say there are a few buildings. I know there are some apartment buildings that have underground parking, And I don't think all of them have been retrofitted. And again, the bell from the earthquake, she made it very clear. There are certain kinds of buildings. There are much more vulnerable. Others are okay. We should know that. I feel we should know that and then decide what to do. You know, if it's an apartment building, obviously we don't own the building, but the landlord should consider doing something, maybe getting a grant. I think last time they did get a grant from the government to help them with that. So that's my point. My point is, let's try to look at these bigger things as we're looking at the other one. Not that the other ones are not important. The trainings are good. The more people it gets served, the more people that yes. But the stuff that I think we can help with the city government is to look at our building codes. I'm sure now the new ones, they all have that. Anyway, so that's my, that's one issue that I think is very important for us to do because I'd hate to be in a situation later something happens and we knew some buildings were needed retrofinnary. We didn't do anything, you know, and more people are injured. Okay, so I'm just throwing that out there. If there is a survey then it should be updated or if it's the same it hasn't changed and then we should know salute we should do something or try to do something and not just leave it there. Okay so it sounds like the first step is you'd like to hear kind of an assessment of buildings in East Pow also and how many of them are kind of at risk seismically. Yes. And even I think homeowners, I think she mentioned certain structure that she feels, you know, they're pretty solid. They're either. But even that kind of let homeowners know, you know, this or that kind of architecture, you might want to consider doing something or checking into it because we don't have the know authority to tell them what to do but kind of educate people on that. So it's another part of education I guess it just into that area of the building you know retrofitting just because what I heard really did anyway you know so that's one thing. The other one in that area of kind kind of the bigger picture is the water. And so I think you did make a summary of our current relationship or we have yet what you want to maybe review that water thing? Because I think we don't have agreements with the couple of water companies to help each other. So, you know, if they needed water in their area, the city, or we needed water. And yeah, so could you give a big if you're referring to the water companies in East Palo Alto, the Ocona tracks and the Palo Alto Park Neutral. Yes. We do not have formal agreements, but we have began having conversations just trying to have these early-only conversations of kind of what it looks like for us to partner, what it looks like to communicate better in an event of emergency, things of that matter. So, I think that's another important area to have an agreement with them. Again, because something happens and they don't have water, then we should be able, I mean, I think when things happen, people will help each other. And I remember being on the school board when the flood happened in 1989, no, 1998. That was earthquake. And you know, in the middle of the night, we called all the drivers and we just send the buses out to the areas to and there was no formal agreement, but you know, what you're going to do not help, but it's always good to have some agreement So I think with the water if we can try to move towards that would be good and I know that in the infrastructure there is that What are they called the interlink or inter Intertide intertide. I think we're working on that right or or yes, we have energized with the our. Yeah, but... So we do have that already. Yes. That one we have. Okay. So maybe just the other the agreements with the water companies might be something good. Correct. We don't have any formal agreements with any of the other water companies in East Palo Alto. We have... Palo Alto Intertai recently, and I could be mistaken. I'll double check on the Menlo Park one. For Menlo Park, yes. So we're working on the Menlo Park one. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, I think that to the degree the city can be, can mitigate us, I guess, borrowing that language, mitigate. So those are kind of bigger, tight things. Anyway, for now, those are the two things. And I might have a couple of other ones. Yes. I did want to mention that I do remember. I don't know if it was necessarily last year or three year before, but I do remember Councilmember Rubrieka that we did have a presentation where we did have, I forgot the name of the group that came and gave us a list of the buildings that should be retrofitted. I think that study, that study I think has already been done or something like it was or a report. So I don't know if there's a way that we can go back and track that and see what it is or what the list looks like and yes the community and economic development department particularly the the building division has record of that and they're they're online if you all want more information about that but that's something that we have a draft of at least that's likely accurate. Accurate meaning that the at-risk buildings there it's unlikely that the list has expanded it might have some things may have been retrofitted. So I don't know we could probably maybe go back and look at that maybe and then from there perhaps look at maybe the top three to begin with just to take a little bit out of time and like I don't know let's say there's 10 on the list but maybe identify the three most vulnerable and try to see if we can do something in respect to that. Like you said, take some kind of action that would be good. Okay, so I don't know if we have any further questions. If we need to, I mean, we're just taking this information, so I don't think we need to vote on anything. Okay. Denise, thank you for an excellent job. When we were asking for a study session, this exceeds expectations. I think we have a clear room at of what we want to do. You know, I guess I do have some comments and I could ask Humza and the police and fire questions, but I guess the first one is do we have an evacuation plan? I mean, playing crash, chemical spill, something, we've got to evacuate 20,000 people from East Palo Alto. Do we have a plan? And do we have, you know, with that need volunteers? Are we, you know, multiple, was it ingress, egress point, like, you know, bait trail, things like that? You know, we're looking at different ways to get out of town. Sorry. Dave Santos, Captain's Police Department. When I first got to the city, I've been here about a year and a half. I met with our Fire Marshal, John Johnston. One of the things that we talked about was coming up with Ingress Egress routes because some of the areas of the city are very, very narrow streets. How are we going to do that? One of the things we just did a tabletop exercise on March 10th with the county that talked about evacuation areas and I think part of our education program coming up because that's what our common theme in every single group we had tonight was you need to take care of yourself and that would include that initial evacuation. One of the things is educating people to one car, things like that. How do we do that? Because I was like, well, no, I have my family. We all have our own cars. Well, but if we don't educate people on, you need to all get into one car, take the essentials. It's just not going to work no matter what kind of plan we come up with, but the county is also a partner in this. They were looking at a program, we got a demo, and I'm trying to remember the name of that. It's a computer program that actually takes real-time data and tells you basically if you need to evacuate this area based on traffic cams, everything that it's taking in, ways, everything else, you're looking at an hour and six minutes. It gets pretty accurate down to the minute. That's if people are cooperating. There's no accident or anything like that. But we know that if there's a major disaster, it would just be like anything else. We would rely on our cert partners that are trained in traffic control because believe it or not, it's not just a matter of putting somebody in an intersection saying, everybody come this way, you actually have to have a little bit of training on getting some traffic flow flow. But we would count on that, we would count on our on-duty officers trying to get the best route. Now that could be contacting public works and saying, I need all the lights going this direction to be either flashing yellow or red or green so we can get people out of a certain area faster. If we have to use our trails, we talked about boats and things like that tonight. I think boats would be a very slow process and not something that's going to happen quickly if there's like a chemical spill or something like that. What we did here from our health officer, certain things like that, it's probably going to be shelter in place before it becomes evacuation. But that's not something that we're going to be able to do with just our on-duty staff and what we have. So we would have to rely on partners to come in and help us. We looked at different areas of what happens if Dunbarton Bridge is the problem. We had a major earthquake and now it's not available anymore. We have to be cognizant of if we start sending people that way, where they're going to go. So we have to be prepared for that and that would be taking in all the information we can get, the communications piece that we're talking about now. We did meet with the ham radio operators races and areas about if our radios don't work. I was in a situation a couple of years ago. I worked in Monterey County. We had no phones, no police radios, no cell phones. It all went dead for about a three-hour period. It was go to what we, people were coming into the police station to report things, and then it was driving around, but we made sure everybody had to come back every 15 minutes so we could check in on them. So situations like that, that's really worst-case scenario. You were talking about radios earlier, a lot of those little radios that people can buy, even when they say, oh, it's got a 22 mile range. That's like in the middle of a desert with nothing in between it. So suddenly, I can't reach the police station on something like that. So it's kind of line of sight. So we need to be prepared for things like that, and that'll be the communications piece that we're looking at as part of our emergency operations plan as well. Hopefully. It's kind of line of sight. So we need to be prepared for things like that. And that'll be the communications piece that we're looking at as part of our emergency operations plan as well. Hopefully answer a question. Yeah, I, you're on. I, another question I have is after an earthquake, you know, one of my good friends is an insurance adjuster in the south and they go into, he goes into hurricanes and there's often a lot of problems of maintaining you know calm after after a big hurricane like a lot of looting crime you know social order can break down. Do you have any thoughts on what East Palto could do just I mean when it happens it happens but is there anything we can proactively do to prepare for the order after an earthquake when things have broken down, people are hungry and angry and they're scared. Are there things that best practices that we can anticipate? Because I know the police are not necessarily going to be the solution for this given the staffing levels in the city. So I personally don't know of a specific best practice, but I think it would partly go to what we're talking about with education. We're a community. We all need to care about each other. And the people you're going to be hurting are your other community members. Instead of becoming a part of the problem that's taking, how can we help our other community members? Would be kind of the direction I would want to see us take and promoting that. As for mitigating afterwards, there's going to be, you look at different things and different riots that have happened. It's going to be very difficult for us to even try to identify people that did something wrong and then after the fact going, oh, you need to prosecute, you need to find people that did these things. It's going to be nearly impossible because if it's that bad, the odds of even having video surveillance from inside a store that got alluded to probably not working because there's no power. So it's trying to keep people just knowing that we're a community. We have to help each other. This store might be the one that opens up and says, hey, you know what? It's the big one. The disaster happened. We want to help people. And they might be one of our suppliers. might be our partner for food. And if everything's gone, well, no one gets anything. So it would be more of just going back to that education piece. I have other questions for staff. I guess I'd like to direct this one at Humsha. I see he's online. I don't know if you can promote him. He's already promoted. Wonderful. So, Humza, what's the status of our, you know, water and sewage infrastructure and, you know, things like water pressure? You know, we have a big earthquake. Do you have any idea of what the end results would be? I mean, I suspect we're looking at, we have kind of an old and aging infrastructure and we'll be looking at a lot of work. You wouldn't be able to tell us when it would be restored, but it's doing rough estimates like how long we might be out of power or how long we might be out of, you know, clean water after, let's say, a 7.0 earthquake and the hayward fall. Thank you for the question, vice mayor Dynand. So in case of an emergency and an impact to the water system, as you all may know already, the majority of our water system is delivered to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, SFPC. So in case if that was to be affected, then we would have an issue there. Our city currently has one well as we we all know, it is the Gloria way well. We are also in the process of working towards achieving some grants for our secondary well, which is the Paddy well. So that would be two alternate water sites that we would have control over as a city. But if there was an impact, like a major impact to the SFPC, the not only East Palo Alto, but a lot of other cities in the region that are highly heavily dependent on SFPC, they would be in trouble. When we did talk to the state a few years ago about water supply and water storage, the state did tell the city that we were supposed to invest heavily in water storage. And so that's what we're currently doing. We're doing the water storage, uh, siding study as well as, uh, water storage siding study, which will lead the way for the design of water storage in the city. So those are a couple of things that we're doing to imp to address, but I can't answer directly your question in case of a major impact to SFPC, what the city would do. There are small things we could do, but if this was a long-term emergency, we would rely heavily on our partners, neighboring communities, and then also the county to assist us. Yeah, I guess one of the point my question is, you know, what is the status of our current infrastructure like how old is it? And you know, in a major earthquake, we'll be looking at clay pipes just breaking, you know, for sewage and you can't, I mean, I mean, that's just kind of my impression is that we don't have, you know, we have a lot of work to do in terms of upgrading our infrastructure and that were very vulnerable in the case of a Major earthquake two things, you know, suddenly having let's say a hundred places around town where we have broken pipes inside this city as well as You know the the water coming across You know the bay from the SFP you see Yeah, that's up to you the great question our water master plan that was completed a couple years ago, identified projects that were high priority. And obviously the pipes that are over 50 to 70 years old were considered high priority replacements. So our water master plan does authorize us to move forward with the priority once. We're in the process of working on a couple projects. I think they were mentioned in the staff report also in Denise's presentation. Those projects that were currently underway are going to bring additional water pressure and supply to areas throughout the city. So currently areas where we have issues with water pressure, where the fire department has also talked to the city about making sure some of these developments and some of these hydrants are brought up to speed with higher pressure. Those are the projects we're currently working on. But once these projects are done, the next focus is going to be on replacing some of these older pipes. And again, you know, it is based on funding. So even though the Water Master Plan is identified, certain priorities of water main that needs to be replaced throughout the sea, we are breaking this down into feasible projects that we have funding to design and. Thank you, Hamza. I guess my another question I have for staff is, is it possible to mandate that apartment buildings and have an emergency supplies closet? Like that, if you have an apartment building, you've got to have emergency generator and flashlights and all the other stuff that would keep people going during an emergency? Is that something that other cities do? I mean, I would think like if you're in hurricane country and you, you know, you lose hour off and that that would be a pretty practical thing like if you've emergency generator in the closet, we can whip out. We haven't found that as something that other cities are requiring apartment buildings, but I wanted us our city attorney if we can, can we impose those requests, I guess, or maybe not requests, but can we ask apartment buildings to have their own emergency supplies and generators and such? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it would be easier to do that. If, for example, we had a permitting regime that required that all rental units, owners of rental units actually have a permit, then there would be conditions that we could impose, but currently we don't have that regulatory regime. The other thing is you could do it perhaps if you did it at the beginning of the development or entitlement of it, but then there would be a question about what the nexus would be to actual requirement. And so it's something we can certainly try and look into, but nothing immediately comes to mind. I think it would be interesting, and I'm not even saying that the apartment building should necessarily pay for it, but if they could just have a emergency cash with supplies. In the case of, I would think responsible apartment owners would be like, yeah, sure, you can have a closet just you know stick a Generator flashlights and some other things because yeah, one of the things if power goes out You might need one refrigerator for medicine, baby formula, whatever and that might be might be helpful I Think I could talk about this all night. I do think we should be shooting for a higher number of shelter beds and more locations. I would also support spending more money on this. I think if you include staff time as a cost that you probably have to budget, you know, not just 160,000, but it's going to be significantly more than that. I fully support your report. I think it's great. I think we need to take it a step by step and that we're not going to get there overnight, but this is a good, you know, for a step. And hopefully, you know, I'm not even saying we go beyond those two initial shelters and get them set up. But in, we're never going to be ready for a massive earthquake, but it sure would be nice if we had the shelter beds and You know six places with shipping containers full of supplies around town and you know geographically dispersed So I'll leave it at that. I know I've talked too much already tonight. I believe mr. Lincoln also has a comment or a question Yeah, so I agree with the priority assignments in this list. I think given that the city doesn't really have a sufficient water supply. In case of emergency, I think it's very important. that we establish a memorandum of understanding with our local water companies. I know that's probably what's in the works because if there's a major disruption to the the Hedge Hedge and that whole water system that we get a majority of our water from will be heavily reliant on other sources and we have two groundwater, water companies in East Palo Alto and I think it's very important that we establish some sort of an agreement in the case of an emergency, you know, where that the city could potentially work with those companies to provide water in the event of a major earthquake. Be I agree with the proposed budget for this, and other than that, that's it. I think that was most of the majority of the comments that I have, but I'm also I know during our training that we took in January. We know as an issue that was brought up about the brown act and how that plays a role in terms of emergencies. I guess one of the council members from Malibu was complaining about the brown act, you know, especially when they had the fires going on around there and it kind of hindered their... I guess one of the council members from Malibu was complaining about the Brown Act, you know, especially when they had the fires going on around there and it kind of hindered their ability to communicate with the city council or with their governing body. So in the event of an emergency, how does like the Brown Act kind of, does that get like suspended in terms of an emergency or how does that work? Yeah, that's a great question. I I don't know the answer off the top of my head, but I can certainly look into it I don't think it's an issue that arises, you know all that often although natural disasters are more common than they are they have been in the All right. Thank you. So in terms of the process, I assume that given that there's been input from various council members to maybe add this or enhance that that. So I'm in support of having a budget to do things, but But you know, at this point, I'm not prepared to support the budget as it is until there is revamping given some of the comments that have come up. Does that make sense? It does council member, I just want to ask, we've heard individual comments. We've not heard any kind of collective understanding of. Well, okay. So for example, I was talking about retrofitting. Okay. So if we bring that back and we do something, it's probably going to require some cost. Now are you saying that you're not going to consider that unless we start taking the vote collectively here? I say this as an exercise where the things that have come up should be incorporated in some fashion and put some numbers to it so that we're realistic about what it is that we're going to approve. I just want to be clear on that because otherwise then there's no point in asking a feedback if it's just going to like okay thanks for your feedback. It's like some of them do have cost implications right so that that will happen. Is that a fair assumption? That is a fair assumption council member with respect to that particular item that you're talking about the retro fitting. I just want to be clear. Most if not all of those buildings are privately owned. The city doesn't own those buildings. That's fine. I don't care who owns them. I want to know whether how safe are there so that we can then communicate to them. And even to the homeowners, let them know something that we know. And that may, I mean, that's just going to be some cost either a flyer or a direct mailing or something. So I, yeah, I just want to be clear that, you know, this is not just the next, the academic exercise, but I think it's a very serious area, which is good. And I think we're updating some things. The city's already doing some things, but I've heard a lot of things come out that I think at least need to be considered. And not, I mean, this was a great package. Don't get me wrong, you know, it's great. But the reason for having this meeting is to hear some things that maybe, you know, even the water, I thought the salge is jumped to that because there was a point in time, maybe 15 years ago, when the city felt that we needed to have an extra well. And so the city commission, the study to see where there was good water, we went through a lot of expands. In fact, that place paddy is ready. It's going to take some money, but we know there's good water down there, and there's plenty of water. And we've done all the work on it with our plan for groundwater. Now, then when we were able to purchase water from Mountain View, and then we got a gift from Palo Alto, it kind of solved the issue of supply as far as like, is there enough water for development? Yeah, there is enough water now. But I think then PADD well sort of receded back, and we left it alone. But in the context of this discussion about emergencies, having extra water, it may be something that the council later wants to consider. Like, is that going to be a priority that we go ahead and open up another well just for the sake of emergency? Because as people mentioned, the HHC system may collapse or something. Anyway, so I'm just racing that issue, right? Which would have implications for doing more in that area. Now, there may be a longer term, but it is something of concern. You know, that if there's not enough water for emergencies, granted there's enough water, we have enough water for development, let's say. We solve that, but the emergency part is the one that's here. So, you know, I think some of the comments and questions I heard kind of led me to that. So now is just sitting there. We did a lot of great work. You know, if we had more money, we'd do that. But we haven't. We decided, leave it alone, because we got enough water. But in this context, we might want to revisit that. Otherwise, it's just sitting there. The last one last thing I'll mention, and this came out of an experience. I lived through a hurricane for three days. Basically, you're looking for water and food and trying to be safe. And it was the worst hurricane in like 80 years. This happened in Mexico and Baja California. One of the things I noticed was, and I think the chief or Captain mentioned, you know, unfortunately, as human beings, even in the worst disaster where people need help and we need to help each other, most people do that, but maybe 10% of the population actually prays on others. They literally pray on other people. I saw it. Okay. Still in things from stores. Grat- anyway. And, uh, you know, that happens in all disasters. But one thing I noticed was the large number of people doing law enforcement, different levels of law enforcement, including people who were not, who seemed to be working with the police. But there was like the, the military was there, you know, state police was there, local police was there, other people over there. And you know, in our situation, I feel like it might be time to consider, and this is something for the, you know, our chief to consider, but I think it'd be important to develop a like a residence academy that people go through a training specifically to help the police in certain emergencies. It could be social emergencies, or even it could be like I saw there, where a lot of people who are not fully trained as law enforcement as police, they can help with crowd control, they can help talk to people. That's what I saw. I saw a whole bunch of people who were not officers, but they were managing the things. And so the officers and everybody was focusing on other areas. So I think there would be plenty of people in our community who would be interested in that. It would be a different function that they could be called upon to whether it's a evacuation, you know, where you just need sometimes crowd control. You need people to help in some ways. So, anyway, I'm just throwing that out of this another possibility to consider that, you know, so we have the served, we have the other people who do that, but having a group that could be available available for the police department to use. Anyway, but otherwise thank you very much. It's been great information and great stuff. Okay, thank you everyone for your participation and I just wanted to say again thank you for all the presenters that we're here presenting. And I just wanted to just comment really quickly because I know it's getting late and we have other things to do. I would personally love to see more community outreach. I know that this was our first meeting really focusing on emergency preparedness. So it was great to know the number of cert certified individuals we have in our city, which were nine. But I think it was suggested earlier that if we have those community events, that we have those booths where we can actually continue encouraging folks to be part of the cert training. And with that, I also just wanted to conclude that from my understanding from the presentation today, the suggested budget is just for year one. And we would be, it's a multi-layer, I believe, priority. And so I think that we're just trying to get some of the, we're just basically trying to get the ball rolling. And so we will be taking into consideration all the other needs that rose from this study session. And I just wanted to say thank you to everyone. And if we have any council reports. I tell, but I want to speak on this issue. Okay. Thank you. So I actually think and I continue to focus on the 72 hour need to do this self-help stuff. I think we've heard it from every single presenter. And I don't particularly see this budget as moving that issue forward as quickly as we need to. You know, I'm unfortunate we're spending $100,000 on plans. Suppose maybe spending $100,000 on trying to prepare our community to actually be available and ready to take care of itself. This isn't a question for me of an apartment owner or building having a bunch of supplies. It's all of us individually with our families, taking care of ourselves in that initial period where we know the fire chief is probably going to be putting out the major, major fires and the major issues. And we're going to be left on our own. And I would say the majority of our community doesn't understand that. And we need to get that information out. And whatever necessary training we can do in collaboration with the police department, with the fire department, I mean, that to me seemed to be the most salient issue that was discussed here today. So, again, this is the first year. I do think that the outreach educational piece, perhaps, should get, and the engagement piece should be increased. So I'll leave that there. As far as the well issues go or the you know storage issues which we've we've been directed by the state to look at both, I'm not sure which one of those should go first. So we have an existing well and I guarantee you that the independent water companies will not be able to supply us water in a major earthquake because of their age and because they don't have the capacity to generate electricity as our pad, as Gloria well-wake, as Gloria Bay well-dust, right? It actually has a diesel engine there, right? It's just a diesel generator, and it can actually provide the water. What I want to understand though, is that even if we were to get a pad D, which is about a $4.5 million investment. And we've already approved a storage tank on the west side that they have to put in the place before they actually open up there before Lindflark actually opens up. It's building. But what I don't understand is the purpose of these wells in an emergency would not be to pressurize the system. Neither of the two wells have that capacity, correct? The purpose of those wells is to allow people to actually get potable water. That's it, right? Because we're not gonna be able to, most likely we'll, we cannot provide, if Hetch Hetchy is down right if the SFPUC you know whatever if the ruptures would have you and we're depending on our own my understanding and you know maybe this needs to come back to us to understand the hydrology of it all but the wells would provide that water for that three day, four days, six damper and see it's obviously a liquid of vital essence. But I think it would be before we decide to say, let's put pad D on. It makes sense to compare whether it's more advantage to have additional storage because the state has already demanded that. So I don't think I can one way or another today say this is better than the other, though I am very, very happy that we invested three and a half million dollars in the glory of Baywell because I think it is it will aptly suit us in the event of an earthquake or losing Hetcheky water. But I think that's a question that perhaps doesn't have to get answered today but could get answered by our public works department in terms of the cost benefit analysis. In Hums' online he's raising his hand and he's's lost his voice, but he's still powering through it. So, well. Thanks, Melvin. And thank you for the question. So yeah, Councilmember Romero, you have a valid question. And I think simply to answer it as simply as I can, the water storage issue is our biggest priority at this point. And the reason for that is there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, the state has required us to invest in water storage and the water storage and you were referring to this before as well. So the 72 hour, the three day rule for water storage is also a necessity. And as you know, we've talked about this before at a council meeting that we need three and a half billion gallons of water storage in the city. We are chipping away at that with the water tank at Woodland, which is about one and a half billion gallons. Then there's that light tree water tank at the PADD storage site, which is about 150,000 gallons. And so our water tank sighting study will assist in pointing out locations where we can insert additional water storage areas. And so that is our biggest priority at this point. It is once the sighting study is done, we're going to look into the design of the water tanks and subsequently look for construction funding to build them. Currently, the pad D site, which is something that we've already designed. So that project has gone through the entire design process. The council has actually accepted the design of that project. So that project is ready to go. It's packaged. We just need the money to build it. And so we are looking for opportunities, grant opportunities. And once they come by, we will be moving forward with that project. However, it is not a, it is not an urgent project as a water storage. Hope that answers your question. Thank you. Thank you. So with that, I think we're going to move on to the last item, which is Council reports. Yes. Sorry, I just want to clarify that I have the right guidance before moving forward. So my first question is, does the council agree with our proposed work plan? What I heard was there were no objections to what we have, but there was this council member, I mentioned having a study of the most vulnerable seismic vulnerable buildings. And so although it's not included in this proposed work plan, we can talk to our building official and our community and economic development department and ask that we work with them on that. So that is not something that's on there, but we can include it. So with that, does the council agree with what we have so far? Can Matt, since as long as you mentioned my name, I was using that as an example. Yes. Which is precisely why I don't wanna leave this and today with a misunderstanding that we're approving what you presented and like okay you're going to include what I said what I was saying was that I heard a lot of different suggestions coming out of the council collectively and I think they all need to be considered in some way otherwise this has just been an academic exercise and we could have just started and finished with the proposal and say yes or no. So I do want to make that clear because is that clear or not? I mean, you know, even right now, for example, the last discussion that's taking place about the potential water well versus the storage, in my opinion, like, that is to be some little report that that that like clearly describes the whole water situation in regards to emergency. Because there's different pieces to it. And where we stand, you know, there's the pipes, there's the supply, there's the storage. Unless we have a clear understanding of that, I think I is one. Consummember not going to be able to say, you know what? Then let's put more money into the storage and get it done. Or you know why we're going to shift to this or that? Yeah, through the through the care. I mean, I just want I want management to understand at least what I'm trying to say because otherwise. Yeah, and we're trying to clarify kind of what we've heard tonight. One of those things being that there was a need or desire for us to do more around raising the councils awareness of what buildings are seismically at risk so that the council could know if we want to do more. Yeah, that's no. So I think what Ms. Garcia is pointing out is kind of everything we've heard and she just started with yours and she's going to continue going down a list. I think I'm sorry, I cut you off. I just I'm just saying that you know a lot of things were said which I agree with of them, that they need to be taken into consideration, come back with some revised budget, blah, blah, blah, and then we could zero in on things. Thank you. And I believe Council member Lincoln has a stand up. Yes. So to address the questions, I agree with one, the proposed work plan. I also agree with the proposed budget to answer that question. I think of already addressed number three. And I think, you know, there's a lot of assumptions that have been rattled off about our current water situation, situation pollal alta. But I think those could be studied, you know, so how we could have an emergency, in an emergency situation, you know, how we could address the water issues. And I think this isn't the first time we've discussed this. There's been a grander report. We simply just don't have enough water in the event of emergency. So I think that should be factored in because that's very important. But yeah, so nevertheless, that's all I have to say for these three items. And so I'm ready to accept the report and move on to our next agenda item. Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. Okay, we're going to see if we can let Ms. Denise summarize tonight so we can all get home. I think she was just summarizing. Yeah, I was just summarizing. So we're going to include, so it sounds like for the most part, we're okay with the proposed work plan. We'll include some work on retrofitting, building, surveying, including more work on water infrastructure and looping in our public works department. And I just want to re-emphasize that this is a multi-department, multi-jurisdictional work. And so we're just trying to wrap our hands around what can we possibly organize for ourselves. And one other thing that I wanted to just know is that although we aren't explicit about the first 72 hours, we do have community outreach and community preparedness on three of the four quarters that are listed in our proposed work plan. So we will, if needed, we can even add additional costs for encouraging residents to get prepared whether that's helping with financial assistance or providing them with equipment. So we're willing to adjust our work plan in our budget in order to meet the needs and the expectations of the city council. Okay, thank you, Mr. Nees, for your summary. So I don't know if we have any council reports before we did public comment earlier. And it was, yeah, it was available. Okay, so then with that, we're going to, the time is 9, 19, we're going to end our meeting or study session. Thank you everyone, and we'll see you next time.