In light of Silvana flood confusion, who can order evacuations?

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, January 2, 2024

EVERETT — Three weeks ago in Silvana, a town set on an island in the Stillaguamish River, firefighters gave residents two options.

Those in the town of about 200 people could either “leave or hunker down in place.” As record flooding sent water into their homes, there was no evacuation order.

Fire District 19 Chief Keith Strotz said that’s because the flooding wasn’t out of the ordinary for Silvana.

“The water just doesn’t get that high,” he said. “We just went around and told everybody that lives in the flood area, ‘It’s going to be a pretty good flood.’”

Before the flood, emergency response agencies were already working to codify a simple question: Who can issue an evacuation?

The county’s Emergency Department’s Director Lucia Schmit said that per state law, the county’s top public safety officials can issue an evacuation. The sheriff’s office and county executive fall under this category. For fire departments, it’s not so clear.

“Fire districts do not align directly with the contiguous boundaries of the county,” she said. “But they have direct responsibility for public safety, and so across the state, that’s interpreted a little bit differently.”

Sky Valley Fire Chief Eric Andrews dealt with the question of evacuations in 2022.

As the Bolt Creek fire grew east of Index, Andrews was the incident commander, responsible for deciding whether to evacuate.

“You have to judge how fast the fire’s moving, how bad the wind is blowing,” he said. “You make your best guess.”

Andrews decided to evacuate over 400 homes, mostly primary residences, in Index, Grotto and Baring.

After Andrews set up evacuation zones, a staff member from the county Department of Emergency Management questioned whether he could do it. Schmit said that conversation was with a newer staff member. While that didn’t affect the emergency response that day, the department clarified incident commanders can trigger an evacuation.

“The incident commander on the scene will say. ‘This area needs to be evacuated,’” she explained, “and then everyone else in the county takes that as the order and works to support it.”

The county executive also has the power to declare an evacuation if an emergency proclamation issued by the governor is in effect. Schmit said the county executive would only be doing that on the recommendation of a local first responder.

A spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management in King County, meanwhile, said only the executive can issue the recommendation.

Andrews disagreed with that interpretation.

“Every fire district in the state of Washington does have the legal right to designate evacuation zones,” he said, a view he said is supported by legal advice provided to Sky Valley Fire.

Schmit says another critical player in the flood was the National Weather Service. The weather service sends emergency messages to residents in flooded areas.

That factors into whether the Department of Emergency Management would do a reverse 911 because the weather service has the primary alerting authority for flooding.

“There’s always a fine line,” Schmit said. “People appreciate being warned once, they don’t appreciate being warned five times. We don’t want to discourage people from signing up for our systems.”

Since 2007, Snohomish County has employed a reverse 911 system that can send alerts to thousands of phones in 62 languages. But using this system doesn’t always make sense because not everyone has a phone associated with their address.

Instead, sometimes the department sends wireless emergency alerts instead.

Flooding can be too complicated to predict, especially around the Stillaguamish River. The river is more prone to flash flooding, making it harder to predict where and when the water will rise, Schmit said. Oftentimes the sheriff’s office and fire district must go door to door to notify residents of the potential danger.

Some areas like Jordan Road along the Stillaguamish flooded only on one side of the street.

Now, the focus is on updating the county’s evacuation plan to make it suitable for all hazards. One idea under consideration is to clarify all incident commanders — including the fire chief — can issue evacuations.

Schmit says that since the 2022 flood season, the department published a preparedness guide and a Hazard Viewer, where people can type addresses and figure out if they’re in the floodplain. The department also acquired four drones. These are able to broadcast from the sky images into the Emergency Action Center so that we can see in real time what’s happening.

Aina de Lapparent Alvarez: 425-339-3449; aina.delapparentalvarez@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @Ainadla.