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Kenai Peninsula’s emergency manager touts outreach, evacuation-messaging bill and wildfire preparedness work
Summary
Office of Emergency Management Director Brenda Auberg told the assembly the office expanded community outreach, home‑addressing and household surveys in wildfire‑vulnerable communities, and helped introduce a bill to standardize statewide evacuation messaging.
Brenda Auberg, director of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management, told the assembly on May 19 that the office has expanded preparedness outreach and interagency coordination, and that she has been involved in drafting legislation to standardize evacuation messaging across Alaska.
Auberg highlighted projects completed or under way: a home‑addressing campaign coordinated with planning, a pocket preparedness guide distributed to borough employees and in outreach events, zoned evacuation mapping for most fire service areas (allowing residents to look up evacuation levels for their addresses), and community household surveys in Cooper Landing, Funny River and Nikiski to drive mitigation and alert enrollment efforts.
Auberg said the borough supported a wildfire risk research collaboration that included household surveys and has applied lessons learned to local alert registration drives; for example Cooper Landing registered 58 households for the local alert system and had 27% of survey respondents express interest in receiving more information. She said those registration numbers are “low‑hanging fruit” for mitigation outreach.
She also described being appointed by the Alaska Emergency Managers Association to work with Sen. Bjorkman on a bill to standardize evacuation levels and messaging across the state. Auberg said the Alaska Fire Chiefs Association and state divisions including the Division of Forestry and the Office of the State Fire Marshal had supported standardized language and that the bill had been introduced with borough support.
Auberg briefed the assembly on the borough’s updated multi‑jurisdictional hazard mitigation plan (which now includes Seldovia and Seward) and on continued work to support municipal partners with ICS and public‑assistance grant navigation. She cautioned the assembly that national FEMA restructuring conversations were ongoing and could affect grant subrecipient arrangements, but said the state Division of Homeland Security has been actively advocating for Alaska jurisdictions.
Assembly members thanked Auberg for the outreach materials and for explaining how local alert enrollment is used operationally; no formal action was taken.
