Marin FEMA tabletop highlights gaps in evacuation communications; local tabletop set for April 30

Laurie, an emergency-management staff member, told the Belvedere Tiburon Joint Disaster Advisory Council on April 15 that a FEMA-facilitated tabletop exercise held at the Marin County Office of Emergency Management surfaced key operational and communications gaps for a Mount Tam–area wildland fire scenario.

The exercise underscored mutual aid as a primary lifeline for the peninsula’s limited local resources, the need to request assets rapidly (including air support), and the importance of timely public alerting, Laurie said. “It’s going to be about 10 minutes” from the time the county is contacted to a dispatched AlertMarin message, she said. During that interval she said officers should be conducting door-to-door evacuations.

The council heard that the county up-staffs during red-flag days, activates a joint information center and readies additional dispatch and fire personnel; local agencies should immediately request mutual aid when a fire breaks out. “If we call and say, hey, we need 20 law enforcement officers … they will scramble and they’ll get here,” Laurie said.

Nut graf: The exercise flagged practical constraints for a peninsula evacuation — limited on-duty staffing, the 10-minute lag to AlertMarin, traffic-management needs, and post‑event reentry control — and prompted the council to schedule a Belvedere–Tiburon tabletop in the local emergency operations center on April 30 to adapt county lessons to local conditions.

Details from the exercise included timelines and notification differences. Laurie said the county’s upgraded AlertMarin is the recommended primary channel; the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system can take “30 to 60 minutes” and will often reach a much larger geographic area than desired. The county has also begun sending emergency notices through Nextdoor, she said.

Speakers at the exercise and in the county debrief discussed traffic-control strategies used in Mill Valley — pre-planned lane reversals and laminated intersection maps stored in trailers so arriving mutual-aid teams can implement known patterns quickly. The council was told to expect outside public-works or law-enforcement personnel unfamiliar with peninsula roads to be part of traffic-control teams during a large evacuation.

Post‑evacuation issues also came up: the county and other agencies discussed using the National Guard to help enforce reentry restrictions and avoid looting, and cautioned about new hazards such as lithium‑battery debris from burned electric vehicles that could make reentry unsafe.

Council members discussed outreach and notification rates. Laurie said sign-ups for AlertMarin in Belvedere and Tiburon remain below 50 percent, with a cited figure of “34, 35 percent” from DC3; she called for more sign-up outreach. Council members proposed working with homeowners associations to raise registration rates locally.

The council’s next step is a local tabletop on April 30 at the Tiburon Police Department emergency operations center. Laurie said the April 30 event will focus on communications and mutual aid and will allow local responders and communications staff to “really work through locally how we’re going to respond and who’s going to help us.” She said she will report back to the disaster council at its next meeting.

Ending: Council members urged follow-up training and drills after the tabletop; several speakers recommended moving from tabletop exercises to hands‑on drills later in the year to test traffic plans, mutual aid activation and public messaging in real time.