Santa Cruz Recommends Emergency Radios Ahead of Fire Season

(TNS) – Peak fire season in California has arrived and county safety officials are recommending a new tool to community members for use during fire incidents and other natural disasters.

The Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience in collaboration with the Santa Cruz Regional 9-1-1 are encouraging residents living in high fire danger areas to consider purchasing a NOAA All Hazards Weather Radio, according to release from the county. The radios provide emergency notifications and information specifically tailored by county emergency managers and distributed through the National Weather Service radio system. A critical feature of the radio is that it can operate on batteries, solar or via a hand crank, making it especially useful during power outages and loss of cellular service.

“It (the radio) serves as an important addition to our emergency communication tool set as it is one of the few ways we can communicate when the power is out, if there is a threat to your life or property,” Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience Director Dave Reid told the Sentinel. “It doesn’t replace the importance of registering with our reverse 9-1-1 system, CodeRED, and knowing your evacuation zone via Zonehaven but it is an additional resource.”

The radios are supplementary to these community alert systems and are widely available online and at retailers, according to the release. Each radio typically costs $20 to $40 and can be identified by the blue and red “All hazards NOAA Weather Radio” logo on the packaging. The county is exploring grant opportunities that will allow it to purchase and distribute these radios to disadvantaged community members at little or no cost.

“Due to the nature of this system it will not be a targeted message only distributed to those impacted, it will be noticed to anyone with a radio tuned to our station,” Reid said. “The messaging however will be specific and detailed to those most at risk.”

Cal Fire CZU unit has been working closely with the county’s response, recovery and resilience office in providing this tool and recommends it be used broadly throughout the community.

“Our recommendation would be that everybody living in an area that could be impacted by wildfire, it would be nice if they had one of these,” said Cal Fire CZU Deputy Chief Jed Wilson. “Areas where you know you have frequent power outages, you know you have difficult cell reception, poor internet service —this would be that communication backup that could allow you to receive a message at a critical time.”

Wilson said his unit is working with the county to acquire and distribute low cost or free radios to the community as soon as late July or early August.

He also echoed a “grim” fire outlook for the summer that was conveyed last month to the County Board of Supervisors in a presentation by Cal Fire CZU Unit Chief Nate Armstrong.

“The outlook for fire season is similar to what we’ve seen previously —we’re in a continued drought, so every year we continue the drought the fuels become more stressed than they were the prior year,” Wilson said. “It all depends on the amount of fire starts and that’s preaching good fire safety, fire prevention…vegetation management programs, shaded fuel breaks. All of those things help keep the fires —if they do start —smaller.”

The county release encourages all residents to sign up for CodeRED alerts by visiting www.scr911.org and familiarizing themselves with their evacuation zone by visiting community.zonehaven.com. Cal Fire’s preparedness resources can be found at readyforwildfire.org.

While these radios are sure to provide a valuable service in the coming months of heightened fire risk, Director Reid took a moment to clarify the broad scope of the radio’s usefulness.

“It’s not just wildfires, we’ll use this tool for earthquakes and other natural disasters,” Reid said. “It’s not something that is useful only for those prone to fire risk.”

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