[San Mateo] County [Grand Jury says county] must make emergency alerts a priority

When San Mateo County identifies an emergency so important it thinks every resident should know, when it attempts to reach out and contact everyone with urgent news, it only reaches 14 percent of us. In a time of growing wildfires, mutating viruses, active shooters, power outages so pervasive they are scheduled, we are still relying on media reports and word of mouth to get out potentially life-saving information.

That is the crux of last week’s San Mateo County civil grand jury report headlined, “Where’s the plan for San Mateo County’s emergency alert system?” Actually, it’s the second time in as many years the grand jury has felt compelled to look into emergency alerts and that isn’t because it thinks the county is doing enough.

I hope readers are familiar with the SMC Alert system. It’s a free service that allows you to sign up for text alerts, emails or landline phone calls in the event the county manager’s office determines an emergency. That responsibility was recently transferred from the Sheriff’s Office, but that hasn’t solved all the problems related to these alerts.

For one thing, the system remains an “opt-in.” To get the alerts, you have to go to the county manager’s office website (just Google “SMC Alert”) and fill out the registration. Incredibly, 86 percent of us haven’t done that. If you haven’t, stop what you are doing and do it now. Recent changes to the law mean that operators can access utilities and other records to sign up more people, but the grand jury found local managers seemed to know little about that.

There are also translation problems. In a county in which 35 percent of residents speak something other than English in their homes, it’s simply not enough for county employees to translate these things into Spanish on the fly. For example, Santa Clara County contracts with a vendor that translates emergency materials into Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin and Vietnamese.

Then there is the matter of a formal plan for alerts. The California Office of Emergency Services suggested counties sign off on their own emergency alert system plan two years ago but that San Mateo County hasn’t yet formalized one. The grand jury says in-house training has lagged as a result and there is no succession plan for using the alert system. There simply is no concrete plan for who provides alerts and when.

There are government services that make life easier and then there are those that make life possible. A strong emergency alert system is in the latter category and should be a priority. We don’t want to see another civil grand jury plead for one in another two years.

Half Moon Bay Review
By Clay Lambert
August 17, 2021