Inside Monterey County’s emergency operations center

While fire officials have set up their base camp at Toro Park, Monterey County agencies are operating an emergency operations center in Salinas.

The center is staffed by representatives from police and fire, public health, public works, emergency response management agencies and organizations like the United Way.

“Back behind the curtain we’re here trying to deal with resources of the incident that aren’t particularly fire trucks,” said Dick Bower, Emergency Operations Manager. “Healthcare, air quality, those kinds of things.”

Along with issuing evacuations and resources for public safety and social services.

“Really help out the community,” said Bower. “Keep engaged with them, giving them information, pushing out notifications if there’s an evacuation.”

Briefings, often several times a day at the Office of Emergency Services, help them keep their finger on the pulse. New information is used to plan and link together key players who work together to put the right resources in place, keeping residents and tourists safe as the wildfire grows.

“We have people on the incident command post once or twice a day,” said Paul Hierling, Alert and Warning Branch Manager. “We have liaisons who are in constant contact with incident command post staff.”

An incident action plan is created everyday with goals they want to achieve for the next 24 hours.

“Right now we’re going to be transitioning into doing damage assessment,” said Bower. “So we have people here right now working that out. What are we going to do to get back out in the field, put people out there to look at damages, look for hazardous materials on site.”

Monitoring air quality is also a priority. Officials said it the worst it’s been in the last decade.

“There’s discussion that this fire in a moment’s notice could double in size and that could put out twice the amount of mass with the things that are burning into the air,” said Richard Stedman with the Monterey Bay Air Resources District. “So we want to make sure that the populations are protected.”