Marin emergency manager briefs Belvedere-Tiburon on Jan. floods, alerts and 9-1-1 outage
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Summary
Marin County emergency management told the Belvedere-Tiburon advisory group that Jan. king tides compounded by storms caused localized flooding, lane reductions on Highway 101 and a countywide 9-1-1 outage; county staff described Alert Marin messaging, sandbag locations and ongoing damage estimates.
Steven Torrance, director of emergency management for the County of Marin, told the Belvedere-Tiburon Disaster Advisory Council that the county’s Jan. storm impacts stemmed from king tides compounded by traditional storms and wind-driven storm surge.
Torrance said tide forecasts rose from about 7.2 feet to as high as 8.4 feet on the bayside, producing localized flooding in places such as Lucky Drive in Corte Madera and the Larkspur area and forcing lane reductions on Highway 101. "What we are starting to see is the king tides are starting to be compounded with storms," Torrance said.
The Board of Supervisors ratified a countywide disaster proclamation earlier the same day, Torrance said; the county is preparing a preliminary damage estimate and has reported "millions of dollars" of levee damage in Santa Venetia. He cautioned that final federal- or state-funded assistance depends on field assessments and eligibility determinations.
Torrance described the county’s public-alerting approach: the county uses Alert Marin for countywide or regional incidents and allows local agencies to use platforms such as Nixle for community-level notices. He said the county sent wireless emergency alerts and text/phone messages during the outage and that "at no point do we see an impact to the Alert Marin system." He also urged residents to confirm their contact details in the new Alert Marin platform after the county migrated from Everbridge to a Surcom-hosted system to meet multilingual-notification requirements.
On the evening of Jan.4 the county experienced a widespread 9-1-1 outage, Torrance said; early indications point to degradation on telecommunications carriers’ networks rather than a failure of county systems. As an interim measure, some fire stations accepted residents who needed to report urgent issues; Torrance said county partners will review whether that instruction should be repeated in future outages.
Torrance said the county published a single countywide sandbag-location map and deployed staff and pumps to support cities, towns and special districts. He recommended residents sign up for both Alert Marin and local Nixle systems where available to increase redundancy but acknowledged many jurisdictions (including Tiburon and Belvedere) do not operate Nixle accounts.
The county plans to work with Caltrans and CHP to improve timeliness of roadway-closure information and will continue coordinating with the National Weather Service, state and federal partners as it refines damage estimates and requests assistance.
