Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management

Good morning, folks. I want to call the meeting or the hearing to start it once we get everybody settled in. Once again, this is Chairman Freddie Rodriguez regarding a hearing, Joint Committee on Emergency Management and also Joint oversight hearing on California's Response to and Preparedness for Extreme Atmospheric River Incidents. Once again, good morning, everyone.

To get this meeting to order, first I want to start by thanking my colleagues for joining me this morning and also want to thank Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia, Chair of the Utilities and Energy Committee.

Today's hearing is an opportunity to hear from the leading climate scientists and researchers on what type of incidents our emergency managers should be prepared for and how we can improve local forecast models, to improve more accurately predict local impacts and the need to quickly warn residents of any danger from flooding or extended power outages. It's also an opportunity to hear from our counties, from four counties that were severely impacted by the storms, and how the state departments continue to assist these communities to recover.

I will also be interested in learning more from our local emergency managers about the progress they are making and if there are any unmet needs the state can provide or if there are any lessons learned that we share before the next disaster strikes, especially when it comes to protecting vulnerable residents and making our lifeline infrastructure systems such as utilities, more resilient to extreme weather incidents. I'm also concerned more than ever about our ability to respond to two major disasters at one time.

Are we preparing for events which we know will cost lives, property, and money? I hope today's panelists can weigh in on this question from their unique perspectives. Before I begin, I want to turn it over to my Co-Chair, Eduardo Garcia, if he has any comments, and from that, we want to open it up to other Members as well.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I mean, what I have to say is not that important, but I do have something to say, though. I do have something to say. Thank you. That's right. I want to thank my colleagues for prioritizing this important topic and convening our three committees. Not always easy to coordinate three particular bodies to come together for this particular subject.

For the Northern California utilities who are present today, I can report the series of storms this January were the worst they have ever experienced, where half of SMUDs customers were in the dark at point during the storm. These rainstorms bring to bear the critical questions we've been asking during recent extreme events, be it wildfires or heat waves or windstorms and floods? How prepared is our critical infrastructure to withstand the impacts of more extreme weather from climate change?

How do we leverage recovering work from one disaster, especially for utility infrastructure to mitigate against as many possible future disasters? What can we do to better plan for our infrastructure investments to Harden for these events? And how do we update our standards to reflect extreme events becoming more common? Look forward to these and many more questions being answered today, and thank you for participating in this comprehensive hearing.

Thank you, Assemblymember, I also want to acknowledge Senator Ashby, who is the Vice Chair of the Joint Committee on Emergency Preparedness. Thank you for joining us. And I think you may have a few comments as well.

Thank you. This was just a test to see if you could pick out the Senator amongst the Assembly Members. So if you did, then congratulations, you get a gold star for today. We are just trying to start rumors is really why I'm here and attending an Assembly hearing. I want to thank the Chairman, both of them, and all of you for coming to do this hearing.

I have the distinct pleasure of being the Vice Chair of the Joint Committee for Emergency Services with this Chairman, and I'm really looking forward to working with all of you on the emergencies that happen around the State of California. Obviously, they are as broad and wide and deep as the independent districts that we each represent could ever provide. And so I'm looking forward to that conversation. But I wanted to be here today for two reasons.

One, to represent the Senate and lend my support to this hearing and to the people who are taking their time to participate in the panels and to have these discussions around the recent storms. And two, because I am the Senator for Sacramento, one of the hardest-hit counties in the last few weeks. And I am very proud of Sacramento County Emergency Services team. I'm very proud of SMUD.

I'm very proud of the City of Sacramento and the City of Elk Grove, all of whom handled extraordinary circumstances. We had five lives lost, over a thousand downed trees. At point we lost two of our smud flower plants, and the largest sump station in the City of Sacramento was running on a backup generator.

But we were able to prevent an awful lot of damage and lost life because of the careful planning and consideration and the hard work of people who work in SMUD and in our cities every day. And so our first responders, I owe you a debt of gratitude. I'm so grateful to you for your hard work, for your coordination, and as always in this region, tremendous collaboration. And I am glad that this Committee has convened to discuss how to be prepared for these events in the future.

We asked for the Governor to declare an emergency a few weeks before the hardest part of that storm hit. And I see some people in this audience who would know well what that means. It means that Sacramento, Elk Grove, and SMUD had access to federal resources immediately. And so I want to thank the governor's staff. I want to thank the other Assembly Members and Senators who asked for that emergency standing and for Sacramento County that had the foresight to do so.

I am glad to be here today. I look forward to working with all of you and the important work that the Joint Committee will do under our leadership. I have to apologize for not being able to stay the entire time because obviously I have to go back to the Senate side before they give my office away and all that stuff. But, I'm really grateful to you. We will be watching the hearing, paying attention, taking notes, and my team will be here to assist as well.

Thank you very much, Chairman.

Thank you, Senator. With that, I believe we also have Assemblymember Hart, you had a few comments.

Thank you, Chair Rodriguez and Vice Chair Ashby and Chair Garcia and the staff for organizing this hearing today. I also want to thank the experts that are slated to testify, including our own Santa Barbara County OES Director Kelly Hubbard. Unfortunately, our district is not new to climate disasters. Five years ago to the day, our communities suffered from the tragic Montecito Debris Flow resulting in the deaths of 23 individuals. This most recent storm tested us once again, five years.

And I appreciate the fast action by Cal OES and the National Guard to partnership with our local governments, federal partners, and first responders to quickly act in that event. And collectively, we've made a lot of progress to protect our communities from the impacts of a changing climate. I also appreciate Governor Newsom for helping to secure a federal major disaster declaration for Santa Barbara County that was very timely and critical for reimbursement for local government actions.

These additional federal resources will help us to clear out the critically full debris basins and help families recover from the devastation as cleanup continues. Cal OES and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife worked very hard together to ensure that we can continue emergency operations while protecting critical steelhead habitat. While operations were paused for a short time, the quick work of all stakeholders ensured we could continue cleanup in a responsible way. So I'm really looking forward to hearing from the testimony today. Thank you.

Thank you, Assemblymember. I think Assemblymember Reyes, you had a question or comment?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to Chair Garcia as well and Chair Bear Cahan and our Joint Vice Chair, Senator Ashby, for putting this hearing together. It's clearly very timely, especially given the recent storms and how devastating the damage was both here in Sacramento and throughout the State of California. I'm glad that Assemblymember Rodriguez was able to bring forth our respective committees to discuss what the Legislature can do to prepare California and to help us to prepare for future emergencies.

I know that his expertise, especially in emergency management, will serve us well as we move forward with the legislative process. As a Member of the Utilities and Energy Committee with Chair Garcia, it's important that we keep in mind how we weatherize our infrastructure so that our constituents are able to keep their lights on, stay safe. And to our first responders, thank you for always keeping us safe. We sincerely appreciate that.

I look forward to hearing from the panelists, and I thank you for allowing me to say a few words.

Thank you, Assemblymember. Assemblymember Matthew, you had a question or comment?

Thank you, Chairman. It's vital that we do this and that we bring everybody together. Thank you, Senator, for being here as well. I think the Senator brought up a good point on the fact that as we get hit, whether it's a storm, whether it's wind, whether it's earthquake, we have to have something that we're able to turn on to keep the lights on, to keep things running, to keep emergency service trucks and repair trucks moving as well.

As we look at going to zero carbon on a lot of things in the future, I know a lot of us have bills and things like that. We need to make sure that we're still able to fuel these things and we're not worried about charging an emergency truck or a battery running Low. We need to be able to go and move and operate, maybe me being a military guy, I just see it that way. But it's important we look at these things strategically.

We look at all aspects that we ensure that the tools we're giving our first responders, our National Guard Service Officers, and Soldiers that are on the ground that are leaving their families during the worst times possible to go out and protect ours, have the access to the right tools and the right equipment, so they can respond and get us back on track and where we need to be. I look forward to the panel and the discussion.

I know a lot of us have teams that are watching and taking notes, but it's time that the fourth largest economy in the world actually starts acting like it and getting our infrastructure fixed so we can be an example of what it ought to look like versus being the example that we're setting. I think our vulnerability of looking like a third-world country right now is there, and we have the know-how, we have the technology.

The question is, will we have the ability as Members of this Legislature, both Assembly and Senate, to take that step forward, to get beyond the talking points of zero carbon and other things that are out there and say, here's what actually works and here's how we're going to take care of the people of California. So thank you all for being here. I look forward to it.

Thank you. Any other Members? Like, any comments? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and begin. But before we get with the first panels, I want to remind everyone public comment may be limited at the end of this hearing due to the number of witnesses testifying in other business in the Assembly.

However, Members of the public are encouraged to visit my Committee's website and submit written testimony or to call at the public comment line, which is 877-692-8957 with the passcode of 1315437 so with that, we'll begin with our first panelist. Our first witness will be Dr. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Dr. Swain, you may begin.

Thank you again for the invitation to speak today. I'm going to quickly share my screen so you can see some of the slides and graphics that I have prepared for this. Hopefully it's coming up full screen. My apologies if the connection is a little choppy. There's an area wide Internet outage today, and I'm doing this through my phone, so fingers crossed the connection holds.

Really, what I wanted to talk about in the context of this hearing today was the physical context for the events that we just observed from December into January 2022-2023 and the level of impacts we've experienced from those events relative to the kinds of events that are plausible, particularly in a warming climate. Because we know that California, of course, is no stranger to extreme wintertime atmospheric river events periodically. But we do expect that climate change is significantly affecting the envelope of what's possible.

So I'll just dive into it now. One thing I wanted to emphasize is that there have been, I think, more hearings on drought scarcity, water scarcity and drought, excuse me, as well as wildfire in recent years than on flood. And I think that's for understandable reasons. We've seen a lot more hydroclimate extremes on the dry side of things in recent years.

But the latest climate science really suggests that even in a state where we're not necessarily seeing large trends in the overall average precipitation, we haven't seen that yet, and we don't necessarily expect to see it in the future. We should be expecting quite large increases in the likelihood of hydroclimate extremes on both ends of the spectrum. So both very dry conditions in a warming climate, but also very wet conditions.

And this may come as a surprise to some folks, but the increase in the very wet conditions may well be greater than the increase in the very dry. Still got to deal with both. But the net effect is that we see more variability, more what we call hydroclimate whiplash, even if we don't see tremendous changes in our overall average precipitation in this part of the world. And there is historical context for severe floods and multi week sequences of storms like we've just seen.

The most intense such event in recorded history goes back, way back, essentially toward the beginning of California's statehood in the mid 18 hundreds with the great flood of 1862 and the paleoclimate record. That record, derived from indirect indicators like river sediments or lake sediments, for example, suggests that very large flood events, comparable to or even larger than what occurred in 1862, happen every one to 200 years. So this is something that would be unlikely on the scale of an individual human lifetime.

But in the long run, geologically speaking, it just happens over and over again in this part of the world, so this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. A modern day repeat, of course, would look very different than it did in 1862. On the plus side, we now have modern flood control infrastructure that didn't exist then. But on the negative side, we have 40 million people living today, give or take, in California at the time.

In 1862, there were closer to 400,000 and millions of those present day California residents live in places that were severely inundated in events like which occurred in 1862. Some research that we did a few years back suggested that there was about a 50-50 chance, maybe even slightly higher than a 50-50 chance, of seeing an 1862-level flood event in California over the next 40 years or so.

So we're not even talking about the end of the 21st century, 2100, which is, I know, pretty speculative time horizon in policy, in the policy world we're talking about over the next 40 years. So not that much longer than the course of your typical home mortgage, for example. The reason for this primarily is that we know that a warming climate increases the ceiling on how much water vapor, the atmosphere can potentially fold.

And so because of this, we anticipate significant increases in the strength and the amount of moisture contained in atmospheric river storms. Just as a reminder for folks, atmospheric rivers are these long but narrow corridors of very concentrated atmospheric water vapor moving quickly in the atmosphere. And that moving quickly part is important, because if you just have a very moist atmosphere that's just kind of sitting there, you don't necessarily have the potential for extreme precipitation.

But if it's very moist and the air is pushing that moisture quickly up against California's coastal mountains, that's when we tend to see our extreme precipitation events. In a warming climate, with more moisture, those same winds are going to generate larger and more intense atmospheric rivers. And so it brings about the potential for historically unprecedented events that are potentially on the order of what happened in 1862 or even greater.

And so this brings us to the ARkstorm 2.0 scenario, which is essentially a disaster and contingency planning scenario inspired by the sorts of USGS approaches to big earthquake scenarios in California. So many folks may be familiar with the great shakeout or the HayWired Scenario, things like that, that have been developed to greatly enhance California's preparedness for major earthquakes. And I think it's done so very successfully over the years.

We're envisioning Arkstorm 2.0 to be the analogous sort of scenario for an extreme flood event in this part of the world. And so along with this, we've been working intensively over the last couple of years. Our first major research publication came out this past summer and was based essentially on two scenarios, the ARk historical and the ARk future scenario. The ARk historical one being one that is plausible in the climate of the 20th century.

So the climate that we were experiencing and the ARk future scenario being a storm scenario that would be plausible with further warming later this century. And both of them were four-week-long sequences of successive atmospheric river storms, not unlike what we just experienced over about a three-week period from late December into mid-January.

And what we found, essentially, is that the plausible amount of water that can fall from the sky during events that we may well experience in the coming decades is pretty phenomenal, even relative to what we just experienced. And I think that's key piece of context here. These are both three to four week long storm sequences, ARk historical, you can see on the left, ARk feature on the right.

But the key point here I wanted to point out is that over the course of three to four weeks, there are plausible sequences of storms that could occur in California, especially in a warming climate that could produce 70 inches or more of liquid equivalent precipitation in some parts of the Sierra Nevada. That is a phenomenal amount of water. And, of course, some of it would fall as snow. But the rest would fall as rain and become runoff.

That's a lot of water for the state's reservoirs and flood control systems to be handling over the course of just a few weeks. And just so, just to provide some historical context for what we just experienced, how does the late December through mid-January event compare?

And this is very rough and approximate, so don't quote me on the specific numbers yet, but in General, it looks like we got about 70 or 80% of the way to our lesser ARk historical scenario that was published last summer this winter, and that is comparable to several other events we've seen in the latter half of the 20th century. So thinking about events in 1995, 1969. It was significantly more intense than what we saw in January 2017, which had notable impacts in Northern California.

But the events this time around were more distributed from far Northern California all the way down into central and parts of Southern California. So this was more of a statewide event than January 2017 was. The main point I wanted to emphasize here is that although we got to about 70 or 80% of the statewide cumulative precipitation we foresaw in our lesser ARk historical scenario, we're nowhere near the kinds of events that we think are plausible in a warming climate.

So note that we didn't even make it to the halfway point in terms of what we could see in something like the ARk future scenario. So the impacts we saw with this event, as adverse and as tragic as they were in some cases, are still nowhere near the magnitude of the kinds of upper-end extremes that we're concerned about, and that we're sort of exploring in the ARkStorm 2.0 scenarios.

And I'll run through this very briefly, but just to point out that it's not only a question of precipitation increases during extreme events in a warming climate, but it's also a question of the warming itself. Because in California's mountains, of course, as you might expect, as temperatures warm, a greater fraction of the precipitation falls as liquid rain rather than frozen snow.

And so instead of accumulating during the storm and melting at some later point, hopefully during the spring or early summer months, which is convenient for our water supply, it may be falling more as rain that runs off immediately, even at higher elevations.

And this is particularly concerning in the central and southern Sierra Nevada and within the San Joaquin river watershed, because in these places, we foresee that even though the most intense precipitation events in a warming climate might be up to 30% to 40% wetter in terms of overall precipitation, those same events generate as much as three to 400% more runoff from the southern Sierra Nevada watersheds because of that dramatic increase in the amount of rain that's falling instead of snow.

So there's more intense precipitation, but also more of that precipitation is immediately running off. And so we found in the work this past summer that climate change has probably already doubled, and I'll just emphasize that probably already doubled the likelihood of an extremely severe storm sequence in California capable of producing major flooding. Again, this is somewhere on the order of about 20% bigger than what we just saw. So that is larger, but at least the arc historical scenario is somewhat comparable.

And we also found, we sort of updated the statistic from 2018 that the cumulative risk of seeing an ARk historical level event, which, again, would be about 20% to 30% larger than what we just saw, is now greater than about 65%. So essentially, there's about a two in three chance of seeing an event that is about 20 or 30% larger than what we just experienced over the next 40 years or so. And so I don't think it really.

It's probably obvious to a lot of folks in this audience why this would be a problem, whether if it were to recur, because there isn't really a modern precedent for an 1862, late great flood. As bad as recent events have been, they're still nowhere near that level of meteorologically speaking. And in terms of the impacts we'd see even in a modern California with reservoirs and flood protection infrastructure.

So there is a real question about how California's water and flood protection infrastructure would fare in the 21st century world, where we not only have more intense atmospheric rivers, but also warmer ones that are producing a lot more runoff per increment of precipitation, because, again, a lot more of that precipitation, especially in the coming decades, is likely to fall as rain rather than snow. So that's sort of what we're looking at in phases 2 and 3 of ARkStorm 2.0.

We're still looking for some support there, but I think we'll get that done. Stay tuned for the results of what this is actually going to look like on the ground. But in the original iteration of ARkStorm, the 1.0 version back from 2010, it was found that an event, a modern recurrence of an 1862-level flood, could, in 2022, dollars, end up being close to a trillion, trillion with a 't', dollar disaster.

So just a massive economic impact from the kinds of events that we're talking about, which, again, are significantly more intense than what we just experienced.

It would involve a temporary or even medium term displacement of millions of people, major and long term destruction of transportation infrastructure and again, affecting essentially all of California's economic sector simultaneously, because it wouldn't just be confined to one major city like a big earthquake probably would, but it would affect Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, agriculture, Silicon Valley, tourism, the movie industry all at once.

And so I want to close here just with some to pivot a little bit away from the doom and gloom here about the kinds of things that we can do about it, because we know the physical reality is that we're seeing an increase in both precipitation intensity, but also in overall aridity. So we can't just be focusing on one or the other along with loss of snowpack and more intense runoffs. But can we mitigate these risks? Can we co-manage the risks of drought and flood simultaneously?

Because if we only focus on one, we're potentially going to be mal-adapting to the other one. One thing that is becoming clear is that the historical paradigms that we've used and management practices that we've been using aren't going to cut it in the 21st century.

So I think that in closing, I wanted to reemphasize that a modern California megafloood, which would be significantly larger than what we just experienced, would be an unprecedented statewide disaster, substantially different in character in many ways to a major earthquake or a severe wildfire.

Larger, potentially even much larger, storm sequences and floods that than were observed in the 20th century are highly plausible in a warming California, partly because we, quote unquote, got lucky in the 20th century, but also because the ceiling is rising with a warming climate. We found that climate change has already doubled the odds of an extremely severe storm sequence, about 20 or 30% more severe than what we just experienced in California.

And in ARkSstorm 2.0, we are exploring the broader implications and economic sorts and societal impacts that would result from this and how to mitigate them. And much can be done to mitigate these risks, both hard infrastructure, the kinds of things we think about, levees and dams, but also soft infrastructure improvement, being flexible with letting the rivers roam, floodplain restoration, levee setbacks, coupling groundwater recharge to floodwaters, things like that.

And that also extends to improved planning and awareness, much as we're discussing, I think, in the hearing today. So with that, I will close, since I think I've probably already gone a little bit over time. But thank you.

Thank you very much, Doctor. We'll next move on to our next witness is Dr. Marty Ralph, a researcher at the University of San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. Ralph, you may begin.

Afternoon, I guess. Morning. Let me share screen here. Get all that set. Here we go. Can you see it okay?

Yes, it's fine.

Great. Well, thank you very much. It's a real honor to be here today with the incredible panel of multiple committees to address the big challenges and opportunities in the future for California to deal with them. Following Dr. Swain's wonderful presentation, I want to validate a key point Daniel made about Arcstorm as the co-lead of Arcstorm 1.0 about a decade ago. We did, in fact conclude about $700 billion of impacts was plausible and to see, but we did not really address the climate change risk aspect.

So Arcstorm 2.0 has done a good job in moving that forward. Part of what I'm going to talk about today was in fact, spawned by Arcstorm 1.0 thinking, which really triggered me personally to pursue heavily solutions, partly to deal with these challenges, largely around the idea of better predictions. So let me go ahead. First of all, we have a definition, formally, in meteorology, of what an atmospheric river is. Here's a nice schematic from a scientific American article about 10 years ago.

One of the startling facts about ARs is an average AR. If you slice across it and calculate the flow of water vapor, it's about the equivalent of 27 Mississippi's. That's an average AR. The big ones can be far more potent. We see them now in modern satellite data that first became available around 1998 and 2000. You can see the pointing there, arrow pointing to it. Imagine the water flowing along that from southwest to northeast.

The bottom part of this, the purples, is the tropics, and we think of that differently. But also you can see the place where this hit in Oregon. Washington got 25 inches of rain in three days. It wouldn't take but a couple of these to happen in a three or four week period to actually create the Arcstorm 2.0 scenario. Not only though, however, do these produce hazards like we've been dealing with, but also incredibly beneficial water for an area prone to big extremes. And wet and dry.

Let me show an example of that that just happened, almost a textbook example from New Year's. This is a parameter called water vapor, integrated water vapor. So it's all the water vapor in the atmosphere from the surface to space, and it lays out that nice line that helps bring the, it sort of evokes the river nature of these things. And you can see where it's hitting the coast.

And then when we add the wind to the calculation, we get the water vapor transport, just as Daniel mentioned is so important, water vapor just sitting there doesn't have the same impact as water vapor moving primarily into the mountains and being forced upward. And what happened when that hit that area of the coast? You can see the bullseye, essentially of the heaviest precipitation in 24 hours, is right where the AR hit.

This is the fundamental message of AR science and impact studies in the West Coast, ARs, where they hit, how long they stall for, how strong they are, is really what determines the impacts. And I just want to show schematically an example of that. This is one of our storms in the AR onslaught of holiday season this year, in early 2023. It's a visible and ir satellite image, and you see the very classic comet cloud.

And that low pressure center at the upper part, where everything's curled around, has been the attention of meteorology for a century. But what we've done over the last decade, thanks in part to inspiration from arc storm and from the science itself, is we started focusing on the part of the storm that is now defined as the atmospheric river. It's sort of the business end of the storm when it comes to impacts on the West Coast, in particular, in California.

The low is very important in many ways, but you can get the low right in prediction and not get the AR right. And that has been a revolution in our thinking and our methods, that our center, CW3E at Scripps, we've focused on now with many partners at DWR and NOAA and elsewhere in the country. Now, the way this thing moves, it sort of moves inland, moves south. It also changes intensity as it's moving.

And here's just a schematic view of what it would look like maybe 24 hours later. Now, imagine trying to predict that and track that where the impact is going to be highest. We've developed a scale for that called the AR scale, and we rank the ARs 1,2,3.4, and five. And here's a tool from our center that's used also by DWR and by many folks in applications to really take all that complicated behavior and boil it down to a single colored dot on the coast.

And that here you see, the orange dot indicates where the maximum intensity of the AR is going to be combined with the duration of the AR. It's not just how strong the AR is at a moment, but it's how long it lasts over your location. If an AR stalls, that's how we get flood. Let me summarize this aspect of the scale and its impacts here in a series of three studies that have been published in the last few years.

Here's our scale, and you see the horizontal axis is the AR duration, the vertical axis is the maximum intensity as it's going overhead. It turns out when we compare it with flood damages, over 40 years of FEMA data, the vast majority of the flood damages are from AR storms. When we rank the damages according to AR scale ranking, we see a nearly logarithmic increase in the damages.

In fact, we see the minimal ARs ones and twos tend to be pretty beneficial because water supply is so important and they're very good producers of water, but the big ones are more hazardous. There's a caveat here, though, and that is if you get an AR one or two that comes right on the heels of an AR four or five, that one's going to have a lot more impact that AR one or two than it would if it hit a dry landscape.

And if the AR four or five hits a dry landscape at the beginning of the wet season, or hits an area that doesn't have much built infrastructure, you're not going to get nearly the impacts there. So we really need to pay attention to the antecedent conditions on the ground and the details of where this hits.

And that is a really core role for the National Weather Service, in my humble opinion, that they can take their expertise in point forecasting and take this situational awareness tool of AR ranking and translate that into specific detailed forecasts for your neighborhood or your constituents. And we have just completed a study, this is from Bartlett and Cordera, that illustrates this through schematic here.

You can see the rising impacts when you have a very ripe, so to speak, antecedent environment, which, by the way, is what happened in this case. That's the scenario when we get a family of ARs coming back to back, or an onslaught of these, like we had the nine in a row hit, that really adds up to big impacts. So what did the events look like this last few weeks? Well, here's the map from our center, supporting a DWR interest in tracking these things.

You can see the color is the intensity, and the oranges are moderate, the reds are strong, and the black one, super rare, exceptional AR. And just for reference, just for comparison, here's the totality of ARs. For three months in the previous winter, we had barely one, and it was a weak one. And look at the red there and the color fill. That's the dryness. The right hand doesn't have the precip on it, but the left has the dryness of it.

And you can see the absence of ARs is really how we descend into drought. And when we get too many, like on the right hand side, what we just had, we end up in flood. So what can we. And a beautiful website, the California Water Watch. I watch that every day, very concisely illustrates the overall status of water supply across the state relative to normal for the date.

And you can see after this onslaught, thankfully, the water storage was up to 98% of normal for the date, and the snow pack is in exceptionally good condition. There still are very many dimensions of drought that are much longer lasting and are going to take years to resolve. But at least we got a good, beneficial side of all this, despite all the terrible things that came with it. Let me show a little bit about what we're doing to try to improve the predictions.

And there's a lot more going on than I can share in just a couple of slides here, but please take a look at our website if you want, and I'll show you that at the end. But here's a premier aspect of what we've developed. At our center, with many colleagues and partners across Federal Government and State, is atmospheric river reconnaissance.

We take the Hurricane Hunter Aircraft the nation has in its arsenal for hurricanes and now use them in an operational way, guided by our center, in partnership with the National Weather Service, to actually measure these storms offshore as they're forming up so that we can better predict them. And on the right, you see the aircraft we're using from the Air Force Weather Reconnaissance Squadron C130s, and the NOAA-G-IV Jet. And on the left, you see a picture of an AR and the color fill there.

And the dotted lines are where we actually flew the two aircraft into this storm to measure it more precisely. The thing is, we've discovered scientifically that when the weather model starts its new forecast with the AR not represented accurately, there's big errors in the prediction of the AR. It's pretty intuitive, but we go out now and we pin down the details of that AR in ways that that data flows right into the operational models.

And for the last few weeks, these data were helping make these forecasts better than they would have otherwise been. And here's an example that shows the scope of what we did. A new record of 13 consecutive days flying these missions. And you can see the dots, the black dots there representing all the different drop sounds we drop out of the plane.

A little sensor package about the size of a coke can, little parachute, measures temperature, pressure, wind and moisture, radios it back to the aircraft, which then satellite data is it back to the big data hub for weather that all the global models draw from. So these were helping over the course of this last onslaught of ARs. Another thing we've done at our center is to build, and lots of partnership with that, build a weather prediction focused, an atmospheric river focused weather prediction model.

We call it West-WRF. And the downward slope of those bold lines over the last few years illustrates a major improvement in the AR prediction skill in this model. And this exceeds the skill of other models because we've tailored it specifically to ARs, where other models are tailored to other things or trying to get the global weather right. And this represented an improvement in the lead time of seeing these ARs coming.

And this is an example of the type of research that is ongoing right now through the California Department of Water Resources AR program to try to improve key elements of forecasts of these ARs. Now, I believe there are many other aspects of these ARs for which OES related concerns require special attention, especially down to the specific watershed scale and impacts in communities where you have to put your emergency responders ahead of time, hopefully get them in place to help people be prepared.

In addition, through the AR scale, the public awareness and situational awareness of your communities is enhanced by the fact that this scale is catching on, and I hear repeatedly from many people outside science, they don't know who I am. They're saying, man, that AR scale is working. And I'm not just trying to say that to self congratulate, but rather to just really point out this is penetrating.

I've always hoped, in developing a scale that would actually be useful in the world of emergency services as a situational awareness tool. And finally, I just want to point to an article more recently, just in last September, in Scientific American, the editors asked me to produce, and it gives, in common language, in a very short and concise way, the story of the creation of the scale, of the AR recon effort, and of the forecast informed reservoir operations program that it helps make successful.

So with that, I'll close here and just offer some encouragement. There are a lot of people who are really motivated to work to improve the forecast of these very dangerous and important storms, and we're here to help as much as we possibly can. And I look forward to any conversations or follow up that may be of interest.

Thank you very much, Doctor. Appreciate your presentation. Now move on to our last witness for this panel, Dr. Michael Anderson, the California Department of Water Resources, and who is the state climatologist. Mr. Anderson, you may begin.

Thank you. Thank you all for the opportunity to speak and present just a little bit about myself and my role. I've worked with the Department now for 18 years. I've been a state climatologist for 16 of those years. My first six months on the job as a river forecaster, I was a forecaster for the 2006 flood. So I've had a long history in emergency response and in the job I currently sit in.

It is a collaborative position between the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Program Office and the State of California. Similar persons such as myself, ideally would be in each state. We have 46 to 48 states that have such a position, often located in an academic institution. I'm one of about half a dozen who are located within a resources agency, and only one of two that are associated with emergency services, my colleague in South Carolina.

So in this role, it's facilitating information exchange and given a background in atmospheric science and civil engineering, I have the opportunity to work with both Dr. Swain and Dr. Ralph in bringing the science into programmatic activity in a way that hopefully helps the State of California move forward and be better prepared.

One of the things that Dr. Ralph mentioned were tools developed in partnership over the past decade with the Center for Western Weather and waters extremes that help with situational awareness, understanding what's coming next, and getting a sense for benefit or hazard with these storms. And indeed, as I'll talk about in a little bit, those tools were used in part of my role during this most recent emergency.

There are other more detailed products that the center provides that are geared more for local water managers that really help them understand what's going on in their watershed, supporting work like forecast informed reservoir operations, and really working across kind of a range of knowledge, helping and guiding outcomes for California. And part of that I like is the benefit of connecting with our federal partners to ensure that the improvement that we develop can be put into the national forecast capability for improved precipit prediction.

Because we need our federal partners to have capabilities that meet California's needs, and this gives us an opportunity to collaboratively pursue those that they otherwise might not have the opportunity to do. So let's talk a little bit about the January 2023 storms. As Dr. Ralph mentioned, nine of them in a three week window. Another comparison for water years 2020 and 2021, which are now our two driest, our driest two year stretch on record.

There were only three strong atmospheric rivers in that two year period, impacting California, where we had four among the nine strong in a three week period. As Dr. Swain mentioned, this storm sequence in its spatial footprint, also very similar to the January 69 events, which is still the flood of record in some locations in the San Joaquin and Tulare Lake bed regions.

In this storm, we had eight new floods of record from Ventura County up through San Joaquin County, and significant impacts on up through Mendocino County, including Sacramento County, San Francisco. Really the fulcrum between storms that impacted the northern part of the state and the southern part of the state, recording 17 inches of rain in that three week period as one of the higher total amounts.

But in understanding where that sits relative to the Great Flood of 1862, in that same three week time span, 1862 had another six inches of rain and then didn't stop there, but went on for another two weeks at that same pace. So giving a sense of, yes, this was a very significant event, but the potential still exists for it to keep going.

And that's where I think having the forecast capability, understanding what's coming next really helps, and that facilitates the role I played during the January 2023 storms, being positioned out at the state operations center, providing situational awareness with the unified command briefings each day, appearing after the weather service, providing the official forecast, and then my role to provide some context to it and using the tools developed with our partnership with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, then spending the rest of the time with the advanced planning unit, which you'll hear about later in the hearings here, really working to make use of the information in a way that we can position resources to try and achieve the greatest success possible in our response capabilities.

To that end, Dr. Swain mentioned there's still more to do. We're on a good path. We have the collaboration, we have the organization, and it's continuing to move forward and make sure that the science developed is integrated into the state programs that allow it to be successfully applied as we experience these new extremes.

And an example of that I want to give is that we actually have an employee from the Center for Western Weather and water extremes with that specialized experience in atmospheric rivers, working in the Department of Water Resources, Hydrology and Flood Operations Office this year, and was participating in the forecast activities that the state co-conducts with the National Weather Service, California Nevada River Forecast center.

And that is proving hugely valuable in sharing that knowledge and really facilitating the information exchange needed to take science and actually put it into practice. With that, I'll end my testimony. And thank you for your time.

Thank you very much, Michael. Appreciate your presentation as well. So now go ahead and open up for any comments or questions by Members up here with me. I just have one quick question, probably for anybody. How can we do a better job in partnering academic innovation and research with the operations of OES and DWR. I don't know if anybody could answer that, or maybe has been answered, but maybe elaborate on that.

I can certainly speak to it. An individual such as myself that has that bridge capability of an understanding of the academic world and the information being developed, but also having the understanding of where it fits and how that information can be used.

Because it's one thing to have great innovations in an observation or forecast capability, but until you get it pivoted into useful information of what it's informing, where you're pre positioning emergency response tools, where you're identifying vulnerabilities that may help set priorities for investment, I think having those folks that service that bridge element really improves that capability of moving science into action.

Okay, if I can add.

Would you like more?

Go ahead.

Go ahead. You want to add to it?

Another response? Yeah, sorry.

I'd like to know the lessons we've learned in working with California Department of Water Resources in developing a research and operations partnership with our center at Scripps Oceanography, UC San Diego, I think serves as an example that could help inform how to proceed with regards to specialized needs for the OES community, and in particular, that partnership couples the innovation that is by its nature, inherent at the University based research center, along with the compelling and critically important operational mission of a key agency like OES.

So we have sort of a roadmap, I would just suggest that I think has proven effective, and we could work with you to explore how that might apply to the OES specific needs.

Okay. Thank you for the input.

Apologies. If I could share one comment along that lines. I just wanted the Committee to know or be aware that the UC system has started the disaster resiliency committees at each UC system, at each UC campus. And so I'm involved with the UC Santa Barbara campus on their Disaster Resiliency Committee, and we work together with them to identify ways that our local teams at the University can support our concepts. For what kinds of research do we need? What kinds of real tools would be helpful?

So I've talked to them about not just research, but maybe then having the science based research and then turning that over to the Public Administration or the Polysi students and having them work on recommended policies to support the research, the science, so that we have ways to implement locally. So I just wanted to be aware of that effort by the UC system here in California.

Okay, thank you very much. Any other questions for Members of the, Assembly Member Dahle, go ahead.

Share and appreciate all the presenters as we confront this new reality. So the couple related questions, what is the state of our current prediction and forecasting ability, the technology we have, and I guess related, are there needed investments we need to be looking at to improve our predicting and forecasting ability as a state? And in light of that, what did forecasting of January storms? I appreciate the discussion about that. Instruct us in terms of future things. We need to be doing better in that regard.

So, Mr. Anderson, I know you touched on it a little bit. Maybe you can start.

Be happy to expand on that a bit. So right now the National Weather Service will issue an official forecast within a 72 hours window. So three days, they provide guidance out to six days. Information that we have working with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes looks at the full two week model run as well as some experimental products in looking out to week three.

And that's some partnership work we're doing with the Weather Services Climate Prediction Center, which really looks at forecasts or outlooks beyond two weeks where we need to improve. We have a sense in that two week window that something will happen. Getting the timing and the position better identified are really some key elements to that. Understanding that time between storms can be absolutely critical to allow rivers to come down a bit before they start rising again, as well as understanding which watershed.

It's one thing to tell you something might happen north of the Bay Area that still covers an immense amount of ground, but be able to say that it will be within Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties enables a much more guided response to happen. And I think that's the area of focus now is really identifying those uncertainties in the forecast models that deal with that timing and position errors that we are currently navigating how to navigate. The uncertainty around those.

If I could add in the storms that we had happen in the last few weeks, we typically saw somewhere from three to five, even seven days heads up that something was coming. And yet the details remained a bit uncertain in terms of both location and intensity. The model forecasts tend to be low biased, we call it the longer the lead time. So we know they can be stronger than they appear.

When we first see indications a few days ahead, one of the things that happened in one of the events, the one that hit Santa Barbara, was until about three or four days ahead, it was aiming at the Russian River area of Northern California. And then after some of our missions out offshore, the forecast shifted southward instead. And Russian River, instead of having its flood of record Santa Barbara mountains, got 10 inches of rain in one day.

So that's the sort of skill and challenge that we face. The ways we address that are through better observations, such as the offshore measurements. In addition, onshore measurements as the storms are coming ashore, including brand new radars that are smaller, cheaper and tailored to western mountainous areas, can detect very heavy rain bands that are underneath all the big NEXRAD radars that sea way up high. And they are where the action is in terms of debris flows.

In addition, we have opportunities to expand the skill in understanding the duration of an AR, where it's going to stall by measuring these storms offshore as they create. What are these large waves and atmospheric phenomena called? Mesoscale frontal waves, about 1000 km long. They're super hard to get right without specialized measurements offshore. Finally, I'll add the tailoring of a weather model to a particular forecast. Problem is how we get the best forecast out of a model and that there's tons of room to improve upon.

I think that is where part of the action is to get down to the scales in timing and location that I imagine OES requirements would point to.

Okay, thank you very much. Assembly Member Schiavo, you had a question.

Thank you. So just a little bit of background. I've worked in deploying nurses to disaster areas, and I know how important, I really appreciate the discussion around being able to accurately predict where and when and how things are going to impact, because I think when we're talking about investments, to your point, the more that we can be accurate in those predictions, the more efficiently we can use our resources.

Because we've been in situations where we deployed nurses to Florida and the hurricane ends up hitting in The Bahamas and having to know do all of the work and logistics to move resources around ends up costing a lot of money in the know.

So appreciate the discussion and just want to continue to look at how we can make sure that we're investing in things that are going to maybe cost a little bit up front, but will actually save us money in the end because we're more effectively able to prepare, prevent, impact, and make sure that we have accurate responses and appropriate responses in the places that we need them most and we use our resources wisely. Look forward to more suggestions, opportunities for us to partner on those things.

Thank you, Assembly Member Mathis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think the biggest thing I always kind of come away with from these things are what do we need to do as the Legislative body? What legislation do we need to look at? I know nobody wants to hear. Everybody's like, please don't run any more bills but the fact of it is, we have to, in order to pinpoint what needs to change.

So for us, what do we need to actually look at as we're running things this year, as we're coming up on Bill entry deadlines, what are some of the top 3-5 things where if you guys could go in, for all the panelists, if you could go in laser point scalpel, this is what needs to get done. This is the type of legislation you need to do. What does that look like for us? What do you all see as the experts?

Well, I'll open with a thank you. In the last budget session, the word ongoing was added to the funding for the AR research program, and that is critical. This is the fuel that creates the collaboration at the local, federal and state levels that has allowed the advancements over the last 10 years to happen.

That I think, as Dr. Ralph had mentioned, can serve as a model in terms of looking at how else to target the necessary collaborations needed to ensure that the emergency services have the right intelligence to make those decisions, for positioning resources to enable the best response possible, especially when you're dealing with events that are going to have the phrase added to it. We haven't seen this before, and I think the more work we spend in improving the forecasting, the better we are anticipating them.

Being able to say, this is outside what we've seen historically, but we still have a sense of what we need to do to navigate.

Sorry I can't put a finer point on it, but I think.

That's definitely helpful. Again, me being a military guy, you plan a mission and you go, okay, here's what we think the enemy situation is going to be. So here's what we think the weather is going to be, but what are the things we need to do to do that? But you understand those things. But you also understand that there are policy things that sometimes get in the way of making those things happen.

So if there's policy things that are in the way, we need to know about that, so we can have it be a faster, more appropriate process. So that way those that need the tools or those that have the tools can act better, faster, sooner, more predictable, so we ensure the safety of everybody, and it's a smoother thing. Military terms to the end, you're not going to go into a gunfight with a nine millimeter when you could have a 50 cow.

Right. I think it's that recognition of what you're facing and being able to have the right preparation and in terms of policy, spoke of it at the beginning of getting the necessary declarations that open the doors for the necessary response tools to be available, and then thinking of that with the standpoint of what Dr. Swain mentioned, that if these same storms are also the storms that you have to derive your water supply from, how do you navigate, recognizing that that's the water that you want to be doing something with in a water supply sense as well as flood mitigation sense, and making sure that?

I believe our colleague, Chris Ward, that was here, has a bill specifically designed at capturing atmospheric rivers that a lot of us are interested in.

So I think those kind of things where you really start looking at kind of a multifaceted capability that we're going to go in this knowing that we're not doing a singular response, but a multifaceted response that makes sure you aren't saying, boy, we could have done this, but we had this rule that got in the way.

Correct. What I've recognized over my tenure here is that too often we stop listening to the experts and the bean counters who have forgotten how beans are grown, are making decisions. So we need to look at the people that actually know how things are done. So I appreciate your time here, and to all the panelists.

And I would just add a small piece.

I was waiting for you to chime in.

Well, in the process of developing the Atmospheric River Program, we incorporated both really sound scientific elements, teams of experts to work on those things, linkages to DWR's operational requirements and needs, respect for the statewide interests and differences in needs across the region. And that ended up being manifest in the form of a state legislative bill that helped pave the way and set the stage for this.

And very much appreciative of Assemblyman Chris Ford's initiative and others on AB 30 to extend that and update it to include the forecast informed reservoir operations component. But that legislative part was, I think, an aspect of what I was referring to in look at the AR program and how we've worked that as a model in supporting DWR's needs, as a model for what could be done, I think for OES needs in particular.

Thank you. One thing I wanted to add, really specific point on top of what Mike had mentioned, I really just wanted to hone in on the specific notion that we really need to be thinking about drought and flood along a spectrum. And I think historically in California, we've separated these two things both legislatively and in terms of response, emergency response, disaster response. And I think that we really need to be comanaging.

And that's not just an abstract statement, but I think it really speaks to the kinds of policy changes that are going to be sustainable in the 21st century California, which is to say accommodating both water scarcity and also overabundance, and maybe more of both at different times. And these sharp transitions between overabundance and scarcity, and how do we leverage one to maybe reduce the risk of the other drought and flood comanagement looking at both of these things.

So perhaps hearings specifically on how to comanage these risks, rather than how to respond only to floods or only to droughts or only to wildfires. And thinking about for all of these, along the spectrum of things that we need to be thinking about balancing one against the other so we don't put ourselves in a position where we've sort of adapted ourselves into a corner that makes it more difficult to respond to other things that we know are also going to occur.

You don't know how refreshing it is to hear co-management of drought and floods for a guy from the San Joaquin Valley. All right, thank you. Any other comments before we move on to the second panel?

If I could just pile on very briefly on Daniel's good remarks, I couldn't agree more about the co-management aspect. We do have something I think folks are familiar with now that has been developed and is now being evaluated for its efficacy is forecast informed reservoir operations, the basic tenet of which is to use existing infrastructure more flexibly in a way that remains safe because of 21st century forecast information, having the skill needed for operators to keep a bit of extra water after a storm and have plenty of time to release it if another storm is coming, or to frankly be able to create more flood space ahead of a storm if that's the need.

So that's one aspect of it. Another is Flood-MAR, which is the prospect of, of course, using floodwaters to recharge groundwater. And there are a variety of other areas, I think, where these co benefits can be achieved partly through better prediction of these very storms that are so important to both the hazards and our precious water supply.

Okay. Thank you very much. And I want to thank the first panel again for all your information bringing forward. And with that, we'll go ahead and move on to our second panel. Thank you. Our first witness on the second panel is Mary Jo Flynn-Nevins, who is the Director of Sacramento County Office of Emergency Services. Director Flynn, you may begin.

Good morning, Chairs Rodriguez, Bauer-Kahan, and Garcia, ranking Members, and Members of the Committee of this joint session. I'm grateful that I can be here today in person to share with you what Sacramento County experienced the past few weeks as a result of the storms and accompanying flooding, as well as opportunities moving forward through the recovery phase and beyond.

In anticipation of incoming storms set to impact the area on Wednesday, December 28, Sacramento County activated the emergency Operations center in a virtual capacity, initiating twice daily calls with our partner, I want to point out, including the National Weather Service Sacramento office, to ensure critical information was shared and to initiate planning for the more extreme storms that were to come.

It was also during this time that county park rangers, Sacramento Sheriff's Office, Sacramento City police, and advocacy organizations made every effort to warn unsheltered residents of the coming storms and to get them to shelter for safety. For all the alert and warning technology for which we advocate very strongly and use, some of the best resources that were available to us for this notification of that particular population were just face to face contacts and communication.

Because of their efforts, individuals did take advantage of the variety of safe spaces for which we had capacity for over 750 people, from motel vouchers to respite centers in advance of the storms, to disaster shelters once closures and evacuation orders and warnings were given. On December 31, Sacramento County issued a local proclamation of emergency and we're grateful to be included in the state proclamation in the amended major disaster declaration. We're also grateful for the swift assistance from both the state and FEMA.

As the rain continued, impacts were felt within the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta, and more specifically for Sacramento County near to and within the community of Wilton along the Cosumnes River. We appreciate the partnership with the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the California Department of Water Resources, who worked tirelessly alongside us to ensure requested resources made it to our impacted communities to include the reclamation districts for critical flood fight efforts.

With each of the storms, high winds brought further widespread damage to the community and caused significant power disruptions throughout the county. Both SMUD and PG&E provided liaisons to our emergency operations center, thereby ensuring a rapid communication pathway was in place for first responders in the field who are often the first to be called out for downed power lines. And within our reclamation district, partners who are dependent on power for their pumps to dewater areas near levees to continue to make those levees safe.

Leading up to these storms, there are some specific preparedness efforts and partnerships with the state that I want to highlight as successes while bringing attention to the continuing need for investment in these areas. First, the California Department of Water Resources has been a tremendous partner in ensuring our regional preparedness for potential flooding. Just months prior to this disaster, the counties of Sacramento, Yolo, San Joaquin, Solano and Contra Costa participated in a large scale field and EOC exercise focused on a flood scenario within the delta.

This exercise touched on communications, unified command, resource request processes, and the terminology for evacuation warning and orders. Many would consider the timing of this exercise to be sheer luck. However, I really want to point out that this was months of planning and financial investment from both the state and the counties involved, and it took a lot to make that exercise happen and would not have been possible without the prioritization and the financial investment of the state and the counties.

The end result is that important lessons learned during the exercise were effectively implemented during this disaster, and our partners, teams, colleagues and communities were better prepared and ready to respond. Second, in March of 2022, the Standardized Emergency Management System, or SEMS, advisory board met and approved the Emergency Management Mutual Aid Plan. This is a plan that has been in progress since 2017, has been updated after many disasters, and we implemented it in Sacramento County during this disaster.

And I'm grateful for its existence, and I'm grateful for our partners who came to our aid. Staffing at almost all organizations over the New Year's holiday weekend were reduced, including within Sacramento County. This welcome assistance from our neighboring jurisdictions allowed us to fill vital EOC positions and therefore meet immediate needs as storms kept coming. In closing, I wanted to take this opportunity to ask on behalf of our organization for your consideration of a few things from very broad scope to more specific requests.

The first is continued investment at the local level for exercises that address the variety of risks and hazards Californians face. This is the best opportunity for local communities to test their plans and ensure that they have the resources and procedures ready for response.

The second, and even if your district was not specifically impacted by this disaster, if you wanted to make an impact on your communities tomorrow, I'd ask that you advocate for, incentivize, and prioritize investments for local professional emergency management staff and the training for those staff. I think we've seen demonstrated from Dr. Swain and Dr. Ralph that the information is emerging and there and access to that training is what our emergency management partners need at the local level to help make some of those critical decisions.

And lastly, and more specifically locally, Sacramento County asks that you support flood risk reduction improvements to rural levees and roads inside and outside of the delta for public safety. Thank you again for your time today and opportunity to speak with you this morning.

Thank you, Mary. Next, we'll move it on to our next witness, Kelly Hubbard, the Director of Santa Barbara County Office of Emergency Services. Director Hubbard, you may begin.

Thank you very much. Good morning. Similar to Mary Jo, Mary Jo, myself, Kelsey and others have coordinated and spoke because we have many of the same issues. So I wanted to first share a little bit of the impacts that we see in our county from these storms, similar preparedness actions as Sacramento County in terms of the days leading up to the storms. Our impacts had significant impacts to our basins.

Twenty seven county controlled debris basins were mostly, if not completely filled by these storms with debris and concepts that had to be moved out. Almost $80 million in debris management alone for our basins. That was actually a good test of systems where we received mitigation money to help improve our systems and our retention basins that we saw work and work well. And so we're going to continue to focus on receiving additional monies and support to continue to enhance our storm related basins.

Our roads, our impacts for our roads, local, state, federal, Los Padres National Forest, and our private roads have all had severe impacts. I have a private road that is now a 16 foot waterfall and no funding or support to help rebuild that road, which is both a home as well as a business, agricultural business. And so there's going to be loss of business, home access, emergency access, and jobs associated with this road. And so a lot of road impacts.

Our utilities performed well in the community and in our county, although we do have very full reservoirs now that are looking at concerns for release of water because of already having downstream impacts. And so we're looking to slowly release water as needed, but maintain as much as we can to continue to fight that drought.

Significant agricultural impacts within our community: we still have some fields that are under seven to 8ft of water with nowhere to drain the water and working to see how they continue to work together and look to that recovery. Our private community is impacted, those who are most vulnerable in our community, and they are all looking for assistance and help. We also have community members who are not comfortable with government and asking for government assistance or coming into government facilities to look for that support.

And so that brings me to part of the conversation here today and who is our vulnerable populations? Who are we talking about? Who are most vulnerable in our communities? And I think the counties here today represent some similar vulnerabilities. For Santa Barbara County, our farm workers and our H2A workers that come in from out of the country to help support our agricultural community, our undocumented community. We have a significant monolingual, non-English speaking community, including Mazatecan, which is an unwritten language.

So how do you communicate and share important alerting information, as well as information on recovery to community that does not have a written language? Our homeless, our seniors, and then those of our community that have access and functional needs that might be physical, social, or mental or otherwise? When we talk about our alerting systems, most of our alerting systems, even with all of this new technology, do not work well for those who may have hearing impairments and use hearing devices.

And so those are continued hurdles with some of those community members. Within emergency management, our hurdles and our abilities to continue to support our community are impacted by constant activation. In my three and a half years at this county, I have been activated for more than 80% of my three and a half years here, 14 activations, five local declarations, two federal, one California disaster assistance act declaration, and one mass casualty with 34 deaths in three and a half years.

This keeps me and my team from being able to move forward on the emergency preparedness efforts that we would like to be able to implement for our community and for our team members. Training is delayed, emergency plans, implementation of legislation, all of those concepts get delayed when we have that constant activation. When we talk about legislation in emergency management, since the end of 2018, there has been 10 unfunded mandates.

These are amazing great improvements or movement within emergency management that are great concepts that often, as a local emergency manager, we are supportive of and appreciate, concepts such as supporting cultural inclusion and awareness, access and functional needs, making sure that people can evacuate with their animals: all great and wonderful things. However, we do not have the resources locally to support those concepts or that implementation. Third hurdle, the ongoing specialization of emergency management. Mary Jo Flynn mentioned hiring local professional emergency managers. Emergency management is a profession.

It continues to grow, but it's also starting to have specialization when we talk about public alerting. Being an alerting expert is almost a full time job, and yet many of us do not have the ability to assign a singular person to take care of alerting within our county or our communities.

So getting to the asks, the needs, trying not to repeat some of the concepts that Mary Jo and others will mention today, but I think one that you will hear from every one of us is the need for full time staffing at the local level to continue to support implementation of these programs that will help our vulnerable communities, our public alert and warning, and supporting our local government agencies such as our utilities, local government, special districts.

We'd like to see more participation and engagement with local county level emergency managers in the development of legislation to ensure that that legislation is taking into the considerations of county government, just and county emergency management, not just the California Office of Emergency Services. At a state level, they have a different wonderful and supportive, but they have a different perspective on what the needs and concerns are that we may deal with at a local level.

And then the third aspect that is maybe a little more specific to Santa Barbara County, but impacts other counties is along the lines of how do we continue to prepare for post-fire environment. Right now when we talk about post-fire, there is only two years of science backing up debris flow modeling.

So when we talk about the potential for debris flows following post-fire, we only get recommendations for two years of what the potential risk is based on storm, and so continuing to invest in the modeling and consideration of how do we scientifically look forward on the risk post-fires. But also our risk now, we had a significant change in our geological landscape, not just in our fire areas, but around our entire county. How do we reevaluate our landscape for landslide debris and mud flows?

Cal OES has been wonderful. They have activated their watershed emergency response task force and they are looking at this and supporting the local community in this question. And so I just wanted to support their efforts and note that as a consideration for future efforts as well. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate comments. We'll move on to our next witness, David Reid, the Director of Santa Cruz Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience. Director Reid, you may begin.

Good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with everyone here today. First and foremost, we at the County of Santa Cruz are grateful for the partnership we've seen from Cal OES and FEMA in support of our community during this disaster. Cal OES Director Ward and her entire team, including Deputy Director Burris, who you will hear from later today, have been partners and have supported our county from the onset of these events. We look forward to partnering with them in the weeks and months on our recovery journey.

For those of you who haven't visited Santa Cruz County, it is an idyllic place to visit and live, yet where we also have residential communities in steep, dynamic mountains subject to wildfire, flooding, and landslides, along coastal rivers and streams subject to flooding and along the coast, all of which are at risk from climate change impacts that we heard from earlier.

During this storm series, we saw over 36 inches of rain in some of our mountain regions, intense winds, and unprecedented alignment of high tides, storm surge, and ocean swell which devastated our coastline. We not only lost pieces of iconic's coastline, but we had residents whose access roads, driveways, and state highways on two different occasions were cut off. Locations flooded for the first time in 40 plus years. The image behind me from Soquel Village, the first time in 40 years, flooded twice in 10 days.

Some residents went without power for more than two weeks and at one point we faced the very real possibility of sheltering tens of thousands of people due to flooding along the Pajaro River. That thankfully never materialized, but we came very, very close. Our county seems to be in a constant state of disaster and recovery.

We know we share this condition with other counties, but it's important to recognize that while much of California may not have the traditional four seasons, we now live in a community with two disaster seasons where we experience the impacts of extreme weather in the winter and fire season the rest of the year. Our county is also subject to sea level rise and ocean related impacts along our developed coastline. Not all counties face the full force of climate change like Santa Cruz County.

We still have rebuilt only two thirds of the road damage sustained in 2017 winter storms, where 194 sites were damaged and over $110,000,000 in damage was created. We're still rebuilding from our CZU Lightning Complex Fire in 2022. We had winter storm events and declared a disaster in the winter of '21 and now we face north of $75 million in damage countywide with our county maintained road network sustaining over $40 million in damage.

We are also an underresourced county which can impact not only our ability to effectively respond to disasters, but also limits our ability to support recovery and build resilience. So in that spirit, and in the spirit of partnership, we want to offer some suggestions for the Committee to consider. Five points I'd like to make.

The first one, we suggest the state offer no interest loans to communities at the onset of disaster so that we are better able to respond without limiting our abilities to provide other critical services. Providing all upfront costs for disaster response is extraordinarily difficult for small counties like Santa Cruz. Number two, we think there needs to be greater support for small special utility districts such as water, sewer, and fire, so that they are more resilient in the face of climate change challenges.

In some cases, we think state agencies could guide these small districts towards partnerships or even mergers so they do not fail in the face of significant disaster. Number three, we think that there are improvements possible in the cleanup phase of disaster, particularly in the area of vegetation removal.

Subsidies allowing counties to offer no-cost vegetation or green waste drop off, or having the state deploy curtain burners or other disposal facilities at the neighborhood or regional level would help remove barriers for residents to clean up properties and keep these downed trees and branches from becoming fuels during our fire season.

Number four, from an alert and warning and forecasting standpoint, we think that there are improvements to be made to the state's designated alert and warning system, RAVE, so that we can message in a more precise and timely manner to communities at risk. We have delayed the implementation of this tool because it doesn't currently meet our needs.

For forecasting, we are seeing that the California Nevada river forecasting models are not accounting for some of the conditions Dr. Swain referenced earlier, as well as other conditions like full reservoirs or reservoir releases. In fact, the forecast center turned off the ensemble model data for the San Lorenzo river because it was not accurately reflecting probabilities of stage levels. It created a flying blind situation for us at the county and with the National Weather Service in terms of how we were expecting that river to respond.

Lastly, we think there's improvements that could be made to state and federal hazard mitigation programs so that we can improve our infrastructure and mitigate our risk more effectively. Many hazard mitigation projects do not pass the initial cost benefit analysis, and so rather than being proactive, we are always reactive, waiting for a road or bridge to fail completely before we can do something about the issue.

Secondly, we believe the disbursement of hazardous fuel mitigation funding should look at a sustainable funding element to high-risk communities as well as a grant based allocation. We can build more capacity in our county if we know there are sustaining funding streams to build off of, rather than fighting for grant dollars with every other county in the state. Thank you for your time and I'd be happy to answer questions at the end.

Thank you very much for your presentation. Next we'll go on to our next witness is Kelsey Scanlon, the emergency service planner for Monterey County. You may begin.

Thank you so much. I just wanted to take this opportunity to second what my colleagues have said. They have been extremely apt and effective in their communication of the challenges that we face as an industry. Essentially, what we also witnessed was a rapid amount of water overwhelming our watershed and water resources very quickly. Specifically the Pajaro River and the Pajaro River levee system, the Carmel River, the Big Sur River, the Nacimiento Reservoir, the Arroyo Seco River, and the Salinas River.

And so it resulted in just about every person in the county being impacted by evacuation orders and warnings, flooding, et cetera, whether they were immediately within the zone or isolated by these large bodies of water, essentially creating islands. For context, we are still actively responding to a community in Big Sur, approximately 160 people who have been isolated by landslides on State Route One for almost 37 days without access to commodities and necessary resources to survive.

I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are extremely proud to not have had any injuries or fatalities, and that was a direct result of the vast amount of emergency alerts that went out to the community early and often, but also really a result of the collaboration between our fire and law partners, engineers, hydrologists, and meteorologists to make timely and effective life-saving decisions. And it really was a perfect example of good government.

The operational area EOC is still presently active and has been active since December 26. In the operational area, we had four EOCs activated at least half of the time, and it has been active for 37 days. We processed over 1,400 resource requests just in the county EOC, with 150 staffers serving at least one 12-hour shift during this activation. Throughout the incident, we had over, cumulatively, not at any given 1.0 in time, but cumulatively, we had almost 20,000 people evacuated due to flooding.

There were about 5,000 structures that were threatened by potential flooding and 100 that had water in them or were damaged or destroyed. And the total amount of time that people were evacuated was approximately 18 days straight. We were able to stand up four temporary evacuation points which served over 150 people. We stood up nine emergency shelters which served over 800 people during that time period. And a lot of this is due to the state and federal resources that we requested.

I would like to acknowledge Cal OES, specifically the SOC. They were a phenomenal resource and partner in making sure that we received the resources we needed to protect lives and property. And that list on the right are all the state and federal resources that were provided to us, and we could not have been so successful without them. And I encourage our state partners to continue to provide support to local jurisdictions in such an efficient and effective manner.

Overall, like I said, we had over 100 residential structures that were damaged. We had eight water and wastewater treatment facilities that were either threatened or impacted and have suffered damages. 20,000 acres of agricultural land, 30 million in response costs, 20 million in permanent repairs, and 75 million in our impacts to the ag industry. We have stood up a local assistance center, which has served almost 2,000 households in 10 days, which is quite fantastic, and all information to second what my colleagues have already said.

But to really get into some of our big problems, which is we do have a housing crisis, as do most counties in the state of California. And because of the way flooding occurs within our county, it's difficult to stand up the shelters that we had. And so we're very encouraging of non-congregate sheltering, specifically hotel vouchers, which are not currently an eligible expense under CDAA and Public Assistance.

A lot of our homeless or unhoused populations are not successful in congregate sheltering, nor do we have the local resources to stand up the massive amount of shelters that we did during this flood. It was very difficult and we relied on outside resources, which is not necessarily the most sustainable practice. We are very much interested and would like support in more refined floodplain mapping.

This helps us make real time decisions based on adequate information, which is not something that I could say we really had, specifically because our stream gauges were just, they were off. They were not as adequate as we needed them to be or accurate as we needed them to be. So, more funding for stream gauges. We have several blind spots along the Salinas River where we just didn't know what the flow was looking like and we had to wait until the peak hit several miles downstream.

So more funding for stream gauges would be extremely useful in real time data gathering. One of the challenges that we are anticipating already is permitting for category C 3G work.

So the permanent work, specifically near waterways, the amount of permitting that's going to be required will likely extend beyond the time period for which we have to complete category C through G work, which means that the cost will essentially fall to the county without reimbursement from FEMA or CDAA. Environmental restoration: we really are struggling to figure out how to clean streams and rivers post-flood.

Between property ownership and environmental regulation, we're almost kind of handcuffed to not do anything at all, which is just such a detriment to the community and to the environment. I would second my colleagues in identifying that there needs to be more modified policies to feasibly allow for federal mitigation projects to occur on private property.

So the best way we can create a resilient community and have fewer impacts in future disasters is to encourage private property owners and incentivize them essentially to protect themselves first, instead of relying so much on government for life and safety purposes, essentially. And then this comes to our second to last point, but both are very similar, which is additional funding for personnel. We have been activated for 37 days and we do not have the staff that we need to staff at an EOC for that long.

We burnt out our staff very quickly and we have been doing so for the last several years due to Covid, wildfires. This time last year, we were responding to the Colorado Fire and the Tonga tsunami in the middle of January. So this very much is an all hazards county, as I'm sure other counties in the state are. And we do not have adequate staffing for that sustained level of service.

So we had essentially reached out to our county or our mutual aid partners to request emergency management mutual aid, and every single one of them were also, excuse the pun, inundated. They did not have the capacity to send mutual aid to other jurisdictions because they were also impacted and they were also short-staffed. And the few counties that weren't impacted are smaller programs that maybe have one or two people in them and they can't afford to send their staff out of county.

So we really need to focus more on finding funding for emergency management personnel within the operational area, but also, more importantly, within the local incorporated jurisdictions. A lot of our local EOCs really fall to the Fire and Police Department and they do not have the subject matter expertise for large-scale disasters that are likely going to impact them.

And then my final point is that Care and Shelter is one of the most significant and important services a local government can provide for their residents who are displaced by an emergency. And we end up relying on the California Department of Social Services to provide shelter staff because ours already have mandates or they're burnt out from past disasters. So funding for emergency management personnel within social services departments in the operational areas would significantly change the lives of our community members.

It would allow for them to receive the necessary Care and Shelter services that are required when they're displaced. But it will also be able to connect our unhoused population to actual long-term social services and to help them transition into permanent housing, which would assist in that unhoused housing crisis that we're all experiencing.

So that's really a high-level summary, but I do really want to thank our state, federal, and local partners, especially my colleagues from Santa Cruz who share the Pajaro River and Pajaro River levee system with us. We would not have been so successful without them. But I will say that there is more work to be done and more resources that need to be committed. We are very fortunate here in Monterey County to be resource-plenty, and it still was not sufficient.

And I encourage everyone in the room to really consider how it is that we are preparing our communities and what types of mitigation and preparedness activities we can do to reduce the impact and response needs that we have just witnessed. And what it sounds like is not even close to what the megastorm would likely impact. So, yeah, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you to our state partners. Thank you to our federal partners, and if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them.

Thank you, Kelsey, for your presentation. Now we'll move on to hear from our Cal OES Deputy Director of Recovery Operations, Ryan Burris. Deputy Director Burris, when you may begin.

Good morning, Chairs of the Committee and Members of each Committee, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. Over the past month, California has experienced multiple lodge and damaging storms that pose a dangerous and dynamic threat to communities throughout our state. We have experienced destructive flooding of homes and infrastructure, levee breaches and overtoppings, mudslides, hurricane force winds in many of our communities, and even a tornado.

Numerous counties were forced to order evacuations of whole communities, execute search and rescue efforts, and put in place emergency mitigation activities to limit the damage and threats posed to California residents. The impacts of these storms have been significant. At the height of the incident, about 55,856 people were under evacuation orders. Twenty six shelters were opened in 13 different counties. Approximately 531,600 households were without power statewide. To date, this disaster has sadly resulted in 21 fatalities from 13 different counties.

We know from experience that these types of widescale flooding events require a whole of government approach to successfully meet the needs of the state and ensure all available intelligence and resources are properly utilized. Close coordination is required from local, state, and Federal Government, and information sharing needs to be effective and close to be instantaneous.

As you've already heard, the state climatologist Mike Anderson was embedded in the state Operations center contributing to the advanced planning efforts alongside key state and federal representatives that have jurisdictional responsibilities and bring resources to the fight. He provided vital support identifying the 17 most vulnerable areas throughout the state and at this point I would like to thank him for his partnership. Our federal partners also provided support utilizing their light detection arrangement technology to identify in urban areas forecasted to flood, such as the City of Merced.

During the event of the lines of communication between the state Operations center and the Flood Operations center were always open and continuously used effectively. In preparation for and during the event, the Governor activated the state operations center to level one and directed an all of government advanced planning effort to ensure that federal, state, and local governments understood where a major flooding could occur, when it could occur, and the extent of the potential impacts.

This was critical to informing all preposition of emergency response assets, evacuation decision making, and targeting priority populations, which we'll expand on later in this presentation. In addition, the California State Warning Center specifically reached out to the key stakeholders to ensure our local partners are ready and capable of sending alerts to impedance storms and to advise that the alert and warning program is available 24/7 for any needed support.

The warning center also monitored and shared all local activated wireless emergency alerts with the regions, LOA, fire, tribal, and sock for situation awareness. Overall, 2,000 weather products were received by the Warning Center, including 250 weather notifications to the executive duty officer and duty officers, which included flash floods, debris flow, avalanche warning, freeze warnings, and highlighting burn scar threats, 207 proclamations, 12 personal locator beacon search and rescue requests were received, 13 dam emergency reports, 150 emails to OES dam safety planning team, 60 duty officer assistance requests, and finally 750 Caltrans reports which included road closures from mudslides, flooding, debris flow, avalanches, and sinkholes.

Our state has seen severe storms in the past. In 2017, 54 counties proclaimed a local state of emergency from a similar flurry of atmospheric rivers. Since then, Cal OES and our state partners have boasted our response capabilities. The state's response to this disaster was significantly enhanced by two recent investments by the Legislature and the Administration.

One was the permanent incident support team, which served as the core around which the state operations center response operated, enhancing coordination across state agencies and up and down the jurisdictional ladder, while also increasing the organizational endurance as this multi-week major response continued. Also, the virus all hazard mutual aid capability which was deployed to pinpoint levee damage. For teams on the ground, provided broad situation awareness of mudslides and flooding generally ensure that incident commanders and state officials had the information needed for decision making.

In addition to these critical investments and partnerships, we have increased the amount and expanded the criteria of prepositioned assets. To prepare for and mitigate the impacts of the weather event, Cal OES and our state agency partners prepositioned resources and strategic locations throughout the state before the first atmospheric river reached our shores.

Considerations for preposition of resources included forecasted precipitation amounts, monitoring of California waterways via the California Nevada River Forecast Center, inundation modeling, estimated impacted populations with inundation areas, critical infrastructure, hospitals and care facilities, major roadways and lifeline routes in areas vulnerable to landslides and to mud flows. The impact to vulnerable communities at risk also influenced decisions on the location of those prepositioned resources. Examples of this strategy included preposition in Merced, where high water vehicles were placed near vulnerable communities at risk.

Similar preposition and decisions occurred for areas of Monterey and Santa Cruz, with communities alongside the rivers you recently heard about today. Fire and rescue resources were prepositioned in 26 counties throughout the state to ensure timely deployment if the need arose, which it did.

203 rescues came from the use of mutual aid preposition resources, which were made up of 501 resources from 93 fire agencies, including 1,531 personnel. Resources including Cal OES engines, local government engines, dozers, aircraft, hand crews, dispatcher, incident management team members, regional task forces, and swift water rescue assets as well. You will hear more details from our military department later on the mission executions of those.

Resources as well. To support local government, efforts for mass care, and shelter operations, Cal OES has also prepositioned care and shelter commodities strategically throughout the state. Commodities stored at these locations areas included specialized equipment for people with access and functional needs, including ADA compliant cots and accessible showers.

Since President Biden's approval of a federal disaster declaration, we have been working hand in hand with our federal colleagues from not only FEMA but also the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, and others to deploy air and ground assets and emergency supplies to several areas throughout the state, and we are extremely appreciative of all the federal support provided to the state during this extremely event.

In addition to Local Assistance Centers, we have seen Disaster Recovery Centers open up in Merced, Monterey, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo Counties with additional senders pending. Over 6,300 households have already been served in these locations statewide. Survivors are able to utilize Disaster Recovery Centers to register for assistance, gain valuable information on all resources available to support all Californians during this difficult time.

Over the past several years, numerous disasters in California have demonstrated that our most vulnerable and at-risk populations feel the impacts of these events at a much higher rate. Addressing the impacts disasters have on the most vulnerable populations have become a key planning and preparedness effort here at Cal OES and was utilized during the response and recovery phases of this event. All disasters disproportionately impact older adults, people with disabilities, and underrepresented communities.

To address these inequities, the Cal OES Office of Access and Functional Needs works in coordination with our activities of the State Operations Center during this incident. The Office of Access and Functional Needs is tasked with identifying the needs of all Californians and working with community partners to integrate the state emergencies management system.

The Office of Access and Functional Needs have been actively engaged in the response and recovery efforts associated with the winter storms, including the following activities: embedding in various task forces in the operations section of the SOC, ensuring the whole community receives critically important information throughout the storm events to include alert and warning efforts, coordinating Center for accessible messaging through the Joint Information Center via the American Sign Language Credentialed Disaster Response Interpreter, coordinating telephonic in in-person world language interpreters and document translation services in all language and amplified information regarding emergency response activities, weather advisories, evacuation planning, power outage, personal preparation, storm safety, and emergency sheltering.

Engaging with the Cal OES Statewide AFN Community Advisory Committee, made up of several community-based organizations to amplify messaging, provide preparedness resources, and identify unmet needs from the recent winter storm disaster. Within the Cal OES's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the Listos Program provides a statewide network of community-based organizations, tribal governments, community emergency response teams across the state to boost resiliency, provide accessible in-language information, and advance a new culture of disaster preparedness.

Listos California staff made live check-in calls to grantees to inquire about concerns and unmet needs in their communities. During the winter storm event, a special emphasis was focusing on the farm worker community in the 13 most impactful counties. The Listos California website was updated with various helpful resources links including providing indigenous language and audio materials. Finally, the list of California grantee currently helps support the disaster recovery by providing translation services, handing out needed resources, and notifying impacting communities on where to go for recovery assistance.

Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion staff also visit every Disaster Recovery Center established throughout the state to help assess the gaps and considerations that are needed. I would also like to highlight two task forces that serve very important roles during the response phase of this disaster, the first being the Priority Populations Task Force. The purpose of this task force was to coordinate all state resources in support of the most vulnerable Californians in response to the recent winter storms disaster.

Representatives from multi-agencies sat on the task force, including California's Health and Human Services Agency, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, the California Department of Social Services, California Department of Rehabilitation, and among many others.

The objective of the Priority Task Force were to develop and disseminate information to local and community partners related to resources for vulnerable individuals, convene local and county government partners to provide real-time and on the ground technical assistance related to resource deployment for vulnerable individuals, evaluate resource requests submitted to the SOC from local and county governments, and make recommendations to the SOC and the Unified Command Group leadership on the deployment of those resources.

This task force identified priority populations to include people who are homeless or unsheltered, people who are older or medically vulnerable, people who are disabled, visible and invisible, and people residing in congregate facilities, medical and non-medical. The task force developed and submitted information to local and community partners related to the forthcoming weather conditions and provided information regarding existing state and federal resources for priority populations. Another critical task force that was stood up in support of our winter storms response was the Advanced Planning Task Force.

The Advanced Planning Task Force was developed to bring management level representatives from state agencies together to assess potential impacts, coordinate the preposition of resources in advance of the approaching storm systems that were forecast to impact the state. In the days leading up to the series of atmospheric rivers, the Advanced Planning Task Force identified high-priority areas. Once a high-priority area is identified, task force agency representatives determined the type and number of resources needed to preposition as needed.

Once resources and assets were identified, agency representatives worked through their Department Operations Center, indoor task forces to mission task or deploy those identified assets. As additional high priority areas were identified, the task force assessed the needs and mission task resources appropriately throughout the process, a key planning factor into these efforts with the potential impact of vulnerable and at-risk populations interwoven.

As we continue to move into the recovery phase of this disaster, it's important to remember that this is a long process and we have a long way to go for our survivors to return to a sense of normalcy. However, as we always do, we will take what we learned and improve our planning and preparedness to mitigate the impacts of future events. In the next two months, the latest revision of the State of California Emergency Plan will go out for public comment.

This plan sets up California's framework for emergency response, including state agency-led emergency support functions and response agency responsibilities. In 2018, following the prior year's severe winter storms and the Oroville Emergency Spillway incident, Cal OES instituted, pursuant to legislation, a requirement on our extremely high and significant hazard classification dam owners to prepare emergency action plans that, among other things, facilitate communication with all downstream public safety agencies and other key partners during a variety of dam incident scenarios.

Several of these EAPs were activated during this recent storm. In 2017 and 18, the Northern California Catastrophic Flood Response Plan was developed and based on a flooding scenario in San Joaquin Valley, but was very informative during the recent storms.

After the flooding of 1996-97, Cal OES created the series of Flood Emergency Action Team reports which we know local jurisdictions use regularly and we are currently in the process of updating, revising, and reimagining those. In the 2020 Emergency Planning Best Practices for Counties document, which was prepared for pursuant to legislation authored by Assembly Member Rodriguez, is a living document informed by after-action reports, including the ones created for this last flooding event.

Our Community Planning Unit and Office of Access and Functional Needs will specifically glean best practices from AAR statewide for addressing the needs of vulnerable communities, households, and individuals for inclusion in their best practice guidance. Once again, thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and I'm available for any questions you may have after this.

Thank you for your input. Next, we'll go to our DWR Deputy Director for Security and Emergency Management, John Paasch. Deputy Director, you may begin.

Thank you, Chair Rodriguez, Chair Garcia. My name is John Paasch, and I am the Deputy Director of the Department of Water Resources's Security and Emergency Management Program. Our mission at the Department is to sustainably manage the water resources of California in cooperation with other agencies to benefit the state's people and protect, restore, and enhance the natural and human environments.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak today and describe the Department of Water Resources's actions to prepare, alert, and protect communities during extreme weather events, specifically those done in close coordination with local, state, and federal partners this past month. DWR activated the Department Operations Center to coordinate information and resources across our Department and in support of the Emergency Operations Centers for the State Water Project, our Division of Safety of Dams, and the State-Federal Flood Operations Center.

This put 251 people in play to support DWR's response in various ways and focus through our Flood Operations Centers and the State Operations Center. The Flood Operations Center is co-located in Sacramento with the National Weather Service, California-Nevada River Forecast Center, the Sacramento Weather Forecast Office, as well as our State Water Project and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Center Valley Project, the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, and the California Data Exchange Center.

It operates in close partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers and Cal OES, who both had agency reps on site, and these partnerships make the FOC a hub of statewide real-time flood operations and water management during extreme events. DWR's bench of technical expertise benefits local communities by providing technical and direct assistance in various forms. One is flood information specialists who are on site in county Emergency Operations Centers. They're data experts, connecting counties to posted hydrologic information and forecast and relaying incident information to the state.

We also have flood fight specialists who are on scene within counties assessing real-time conditions alongside local flood managers, advising on flood fight measures, and sharing incident information. And when an incident escalates, an incident command team can be brought in to support local responders. We also have flood fight materials that were deployed.

These are supplies that were prepositioned at 41 locations across the state, and at the end of the event, we've deployed over 900,000 sandbags, 3,000 linear feet of muscle wall, and 300 rolls of plastic sheeting to local public agencies, intent being to protect public infrastructure. This is all done in cooperation with our other state, federal, and local partners. As mentioned, we also participated at the State Operations Center and the Advanced Planning Task Force.

In addition to the DWR reps at the SOC, we had experts on dam safety, flood systems, and hydrology who were embedded at the SOC with other supporting departments to support the advanced planning and mission-critical staging of resources ahead of time. 53 incidents were reported to the Flood Operations Center from 14 counties, 38 of which were visited by DWR flood fight specialists, but I want to note that not all incidents are reported to the FOC or to the state.

Many flood threats are discovered and addressed at the local level and handled at the local level. Now to speak a little bit about our actions before an extreme event occurs, DWR, primarily through our Division of Flood Management, takes action year-round to prepare communities for flooding. We administer the National Flood Insurance Program, which includes community assistance visits and discussions with local flood managers on risk reduction measures. We also promote--sorry I lost my place here.

We also promote local flood emergency preparedness and local--and build operational capacity through Flood ER grants, as was mentioned, from Sacramento County, providing funding and technical assistance to local agencies, cities, and counties to develop and update emergency plans, early warning systems to conduct training and exercises, and to purchase materials and equipment needed to initiate and conduct local flood fights.

We lead and conduct preseason flood coordination meetings with support from Cal OES, the National Weather Service, the California Conservation Corps, CAL FIRE, the Army Corps of Engineers, county emergency managers, and local flood managers. This is a venue to share local concerns, reiterate rules and procedures, and to connect with public partners that are integral to protecting communities. We also provide flood project implementation in the form of systemwide small communities and projects, the Central Valley Tributaries Program, and multi-benefit projects.

This injects state funding and expertise to implement physical, structural improvements, including nature-based solutions, all to reduce risk. To conclude my remarks, I want to thank the many agencies and individuals who contributed to the response during the event and leave you with my Department's motivation and commitment to continue to support our communities, to bring our expertise to bear before and during weather events. Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation and now move on to our last witness of the panel is Acting General of the California Military Department, Major General Matthew Beevers. Major General Beevers, you may begin. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chairs. Good afternoon, Members. Starting on the 31st of December and concluding on the 24th of January, we deployed two different task forces, one aviation and one ground task force. The ground task force consisted of two what we call consequence management companies, an engineer company and a military police company. Our aviation assets consist of five aircraft, that being search and rescue and heavy lift. Those two task forces probably included about 550 or so soldiers and airmen.

I want to talk just briefly about a couple of examples of how we deployed those two task forces across the state. So 40 high-water vehicles were deployed from as far north as Eureka to south of Santa Barbara, and they participated in a number of rescues. Probably the one you might remember is at a Campo priority population there, about 200 residents in a trailer park completely surrounded in water.

My folks working with the locals were able to rescue each one of those residents and get them out to safety. Another example--and this is down in Montecito, and it was our aviation task force or rather it was another ground task force, it was the six 40th engineer company out of Chico--they deployed from their home station in Chico, got down to Montecito in 36 hours safely, and were able to reduce the debris basin at the San Ysidro River there on Randall Road in Montecito.

And they reduced that debris basin, taking out, I think, 15,000 cubic yards of debris. And that ensured that we did not have a repeat of what occurred there in 2018 with the tragedy, with all those lives that were lost. An example of our aviation resources that we employed was at a levee breach in the Bear Creek area of Merced along Franklin Boulevard. And our heavy lift aircraft were able to take big HESCO barriers, if you will, off the ground, fly them into the breach, and they concluded that operation at about 9:00 one night.

So the last part of their flight operations, they flew in under night vision goggles to ensure that the breach was cleared. I guess, finally, I just mentioned, and I want to talk a little bit about what Ryan discussed relative to advanced planning and the state's emergency management system.

So in this flood fight, what I thought was extraordinary was the state's ability to take predictive tools, early warning tools, and bring that into an advanced planning cell and then make predictions on where equipment needed to go ahead of the emergency. And that occurred across this entire flood fight, and that should not be overstated. That was impressive. And then finally, made a mention earlier about the state's emergency management system.

That is not only the gold standard of California or our country, that is the gold standard globally. Nobody does it better. Nobody does it better than the State of California. And unfortunately, we have a lot of practice at it. But the systems that are set up to ensure that we put the right piece of equipment at the right place at the right time to get the desired effect that we want, that is critical, and we do it better than anybody else.

Well, thank you. Really thank you for the presentation. I thank everybody that is in this second panel. This is a large panel. A lot of information, I think, not just our first responders, but it trickles down to the local level communities on how they respond. And every area was impacted differently than others, right, depending on the size, their jurisdiction, rural or urban settings. I have a lot to say.

I'm trying to narrow down my thoughts, but I'm going to open it up to any Members of the Committee that want to go first, may have something. Assembly Member Schiavo, you can go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you so much for the information today. It's incredibly helpful and just for the work that you've been doing. I know working in disasters is not an easy job.

I've just been thinking a lot about how in the last few years and, you know, currently and in the immediate future, really, we're making historic investments in infrastructure and the ways in which we can make sure that those investments into disaster mitigation, utility infrastructure, and other capital projects, how we can make sure that these investments that are happening now are really going to set us up where we need to be in the future, especially, I think, and maybe you want to take a first shot at this, Mr. Paasch, but setting us up for more effectively preventing flood, capturing that water, management of that water effectively so that like we were talking about the planned releases and things like that, that will make a big difference to prevent flooding and also recharge groundwater and all of the other things that we need to be doing right, that dual coordination.

So is there strategic planning that's happening right now around these infrastructure investments with agencies? And how can we ensure that these investments are taking into consideration climate resilience in those infrastructure investments?

Yeah, thank you for that question. That's definitely at the forefront of our thinking, our strategic planning across--within our Department of Water Resources, and we're not doing that alone. That's in coordination with the Governor's Office at the agency level, with the sister departments within our agency. It all ties together. It truly is integrated and it is and needs to continue to be co-managed, I think, was the term used. The solutions there--there's no one solution to one problem. The solutions have to solve multiple problems.

When we talk about multi-benefit projects, levee setbacks, leaving more room, nature-based solutions, more room for the water to flow because in the scenarios that are presented before us in the first panel, there's not a levee system you're going to construct that can contain all that water.

That's the challenge and that's why it's great working with this group here because there's a life safety element to this and the evacuation, the mass care and shelter in that kind of a scenario, it's going to be key to protecting lives and keeping those fatalities down. But just as a Department, we're still fully into drought mode. While a lot of areas in the state received a lot of precip and their drought conditions have maybe lessened, there's other parts of the state that didn't see that inflow of water. I mean, there's still reservoirs up north; Shasta, the largest reservoir in the states, not as full as a lot of the reservoirs in the Central California and the Central Coast.

So being able to manage the water as we receive it for multiple benefits, for flood protection, for groundwater recharge, to help us make more progress in remediating the impacts of the drought, that's the expectation that we have and we need to be able to do that.

Just add a finer point to that, first off, thanks, and you know, here at OES, we do manage the mitigation federal dollars. We did recently submit two aquifers projects to do just this and they were agreed upon by the federal government to be looked at. So that's a huge plus, and as far as how we buy down risk, that is something we absolutely do. We look at when we get these applications in throughout, statewide, north, south, and it has to be all hazards too.

If you just think, just last October, we had a fire, ERS, Hurricane K, and then we had mudslides within like a week period. And this is an all-hazard state. I mean, when we start saying hurricane and tornado within two months, it's a problem that we're addressing. It's something that we look at. We continue to work with the federal government to get more dollars in. With the hazard mitigation we work with our local partners to ensure that they have an opportunity to get that money.

And as I mentioned before, we have the State Hazard Mitigation Plan that'll be available for comment next week, and what that does, it identifies the areas that statewide are at risk and how we should mitigate. And then the Local Hazard Mitigation Plan that the locals can generate can use that state plan as a strong reference and we will support them right in those plans.

And if I could get a great example of the mitigation that Mr. Buras just mentioned and that the Major General talked about, that Randall Road Basin post-Montecito debris flow five years ago, we were able to get Hazard Mitigation Grant funding as a county for that. We had to buy out eight Montecito homes. It took many, many years to talk to those homeowners and convince them of the benefits of this concept.

One home was actually picked up in its entirety, moved across the street into a safer location. As an example, one home was four million dollars and we had to buy out eight of those. And then that does not include the actual cost of the construction and improvements, the mitigation improvements in that basin. So the concept of co-managing and climate resilience and infrastructure is an amazing and wonderful concept. It's also a very expensive one.

And so the continued investment into hazard mitigation funds, the continued investment into joint engineering and problem-solving--I know David talked about in Santa Cruz, and I have the same issue, and Kelsey has the same issue with coastal flooding and concepts and climate change is going to continue to enhance that--it is very politically challenging to change coastal permitting and planning concepts to reflect these concepts of climate resilience. And it's difficult and, again, costly as we do those, and so just keeping those factors in mind, those are concepts we're all looking at and some of the hurdles we have with those.

Mr. Chair, if I could add, please. I know you're looking at infrastructure in a grander, larger, statewide concept, but I also wanted to bring your attention to the fact that these storms are not necessarily over. This is the beginning of our water year. We are looking for more. We have a tremendously large snowpack, thankfully, but if we get a warm system on top of that snowpack, we're looking at impacts downstream from that again.

But what I want to bring your attention to at the local level regarding infrastructure is the damage and impact to roads. Those rural roads that move agricultural products that are our evacuation corridors, those have all been substantially damaged in these storms, not only from water, but from the rock--thankfully, thank you--that has been moving across these roads to try and patch levee systems. Thousands of tons of rock have moved across these roads across California.

I don't even know the entire amount, but that has done just as much damage to the roads and undermines those roads that are those critical evacuation corridors, some of which went underwater in our county in Sacramento. And so I just wanted to bring that to your attention, that we're looking at this particular storm system as being over, but we still have the rest of our water year to kind of collect that remaining water. So we're planning and looking forward for those eventualities, but those impacts are real for our local communities and residents.

And going back to Kelsey's comment earlier about private--the roads are also a private issue--and the infrastructure, we have private community members, private land that we can't go into as government, but impacts our life safety for other residents and life safety for our responders who have to go in when things do occur. And so investing in that concept of mitigation in private lands, both business and homeowners, can help us with that overall concept of impacts to our overall critical infrastructure in our communities.

Yeah, I think to just add on to what my colleagues have already said is that the complexities of private property ownership along our waterways has really limited us. But also, as Kelly just mentioned, increases the risk. So we have a lot of woody flood debris in our waterways on private property, and while they're not an immediate threat to health and safety or any residential structure, they do create somewhat of a damming effect for future flooding and it's only January.

And a lot of that won't be able to be removed by the property owners until late in the summer just due to access. And as Kelly had already mentioned, we cannot access the private properties. There are no programs for accessing waterways that don't require an exhaustive amount of permitting to remove that debris. So it's a really complex problem and none of us really know how to address it and there aren't really established programs or policies for addressing that kind of emergency work.

Thank you. I think I may have be the only one with the honor of being on all three committees that are jointly convened here today, so I look forward to working with you all on addressing these concerns and I know how important it is for our communities. Thank you.

I'll just probably try to narrow down the two questions here: being the fact that these storms came pretty much simultaneously back to back, right, and I think probably impacted us probably worse than we anticipated, so would it be kind of fair to say with some departments or agencies that we're kind of caught off guard because we haven't had this significant of rain in centuries, I guess, as we're talking about things are going to get hotter and wetter that as this storm came in, in a sense, wow, it's really more severe than ever and we weren't really prepared enough.

What are lessons learned from this moving forward? Because obviously it takes time, it takes money, and the planning, but what do we learn from this? And were we kind of caught off guard a little bit by this scenario being because we haven't had something like this in years, right, or decades, I guess?

So what do we learn from this? How do we move forward preparing for a next series of events? Because to me, I look at it in disaster emergency planning that we always need to prepare worst case scenarios no matter what. And the reason why I say that back in 2006, I was deployed to Hurricane Rita and Katrina in Louisiana, and back then FEMA and everybody in those states thought we were ready for the hurricanes.

When they came, the surges came over 30 feet inland and wiped out communities. I was probably there within the first week as a real boots on the ground, and it was chaos going to the community, to the command centers. It was like, grab your stuff and go because nobody knew anything. That was 2006. I know now, moving forward, things have changed, and General, you talked about California. It is a disaster-prone state. Stuffs are going to happen here, whether it's the fires, the floods, and my biggest things I advocate earthquakes.

What do we do when we're having this major flooding? Levees start to break and then an earthquake. We're not really ready, I don't think. So how do we move forward addressing these issues? And I know a lot of it may come to us, too, putting fund set aside to make sure we prepare ourselves as lessons learned from what happened here moving forward. So I don't know if anybody can elaborate to that.

I know some of the first panel talked about investing more tabletop scenarios as you move forward because things are going to happen and people come and go in some of these positions. So how do we kind of continue moving California forward and being that leader when it comes to disaster response and preparedness?

If you'll indulge me and let me go first, I think California was well prepared for this event. If you're familiar with Greek mythology, there is a character in Greek mythology called Cassandra who had a curse, and she could predict the future, but her curse was that nobody believed her. And I feel like some of my colleagues in emergency management live that curse occasionally, but in this state, I feel well-supported and listened to that we can address some of the needs that we have.

What I think impacted some of this is it happened on a holiday weekend, a holiday weekend where people were expecting to be out celebrating and indulging, and that impacted staffing, it impacted our ability to notify people of impending danger, travel along the freeway systems, and the impacts that happened there were some important things that happened in Sacramento County and where lives were lost.

And I'd like to say that we're well prepared for this event, but I also know that it is incumbent upon us to keep preparing, and that's why I did mention the need for that resourcing and that financial investment in professional emergency management at the local level. There's been tremendous support at the state level. One of my favorite people from the state was our Emergency Services Coordinator, who sat side beside all of our staff in the EOC and provided that connection and that resource.

But at the same time, if I had a greater staff, if I had more knowledgeable staff who could specialize in some of these things, I think that would set us apart and move us even further forward.

Just from the OES side, I, first for Mary Jo, I'm glad we were able to support you as well as we did, and Kelsey and David and others, I also agree we were prepared. General and I and his team were actively in front of this. The Advanced Planning Cell was working days before the first atmospheric river came abroad, thanks to people like Mike, as our state climatologist that alerted us very early that this was potentially coming.

I think what we saw is it hasn't really rained here in several years, and when it started to rain, and we were saying constantly, Caltrans had signs up when you were driving, right? It's like, 'stay off the road,' and you know, it's difficult to grasp what that is in California because we haven't seen this in a very long time. And I think moving forward, we always have to prepare. We have to have plans in place. We have to exercise. That's what we do at OES.

We have a strong partnership with all of our state and local partners, and this is just another thing. But I agree with you, when you prepare for something like this, you also have to prepare for that earthquake, wherever that may be, and you also have to prepare for that cyber attack that may put your systems in place and really have a maximum, a maximum plan, and that's what we've been trying to do here at OES with our state partners. General, I don't know if you have anything else to add.

No. Ryan's absolutely right. I dovetail on what you said, Mr. Chairman. The training and exercise component, that's hugely important.

At the end of the day, we don't care what it is. The concepts and the principles are fundamentally the same. Training and exercise thinks huge.

Yeah. And with that said. Go ahead.

I just want to highlight one thing real quick. I think it's important to recognize in that first panel that the forecasting capacity of our weather partners is critical. Right now, the best available data comes to us, 12 to 24 hours at most, ahead of time in terms of intensity, location, duration. And those further out models are not accurate enough. So we need to get better there. We also need to get better on the California Nevada River Forecasting Center side of things.

I think those models, while probably very complex and robust, we're not accounting for all of the things that they need to account for now, not only in the San Lorenzo River, but also in the Pajaro River Watershed. So I think there's opportunities to improve those forecasting models, both weather and river, that we need to focus on. As was articulated a little bit in that first panel.

I would second what my colleague in Santa Cruz County has said. Literally every single time the hydrographs were updated for that 20-day period, the actual precipitation was significantly greater than what had been forecasted. And so modeling could be extremely better and more useful for that real-time decision-making. What I will also say is one of the things that we struggle with is the concept of disaster service workers.

While, yes, every government employee is a disaster service worker, it is extremely difficult to train thousands of people in a paramilitary structure, which is what ICS is to work in an EOC. A lot of them are unfamiliar with how chain of command works. It's difficult to pull them out of their bureaucratic chain of command that they have on a day-to-day basis and to pull them away from their jobs and typically mandates that they have.

And so that's when we're talking about we as emergency managers, are aware of the risks. We are prepared. And I don't think any of us were surprised about this, because we talk about this all day, every day, and we're constantly struggling with limited resources and limited attention in the political sphere because the second the disaster is over, the attention essentially dissipates and it's not brought to everyone's forefront until it's too late, until that 24 hours.

And they're wondering why we don't have enough resources, why we don't have enough training, why the facility isn't large enough, why we aren't sending out emergency alerts. And it's because of that myopic nature of our communities and how we address emergency management and preparedness, both at the government level, but within the community as well. And so we really need to talk about that paradigm shift within the community and what does a resilient community actually look like? What is it going to take?

And right now we're at the very start of that. While yes, we are the forefront in the country for preparedness and mitigation, we still have a very long ways to go. Climate change is actually here. I know we've been talking about one day it's here, we have communities living in it daily and it's no longer really something that we can ignore. The expectation of services from emergency management has greatly surpassed the amount of funding available.

If you look at the emergency management performance grant, it has only increased in like 200 million in the last decade, whereas homeland security, for equipment, has almost tripled. So we need to really look at our funding priorities for what we want to see in the community and how best to do that. At the end of the day, state and local resources are fantastic, but the local governments are ultimately responsible for those decisions long after you all leave.

And so I highly encourage, like I said, more capacity at the local level.

Okay, thank you.

I was gonna say that I was. I will admit I will eat this, that we were unprepared for a portion of our community. We were preparing for our fire burn scar areas and our traditional areas of impact for a large storm. We have not had large storm impacts in our North County. It was something that we were caught off guard on. They were not your traditional watershed, stream, or fire impact zones. These were simply areas of agriculture that did not have drainage and concepts associated with significant storms.

And then the concepts of geological concepts of our canyons. These aren't waterways. These are just simply canyons and roadways that are built into our infrastructure, built into canyons or hillsides. And so those areas hadn't been impacted since the 1969 flood. Going back to the modeling, the ARkStorm concept, supporting ARkStorm scenarios like we have for earthquakes on local regional levels to get more granular data for us to base our planning on.

So I'm not just looking at my burn scars and my waterways, but I'm looking at my whole county as potential flood. Majority of my impacts were not in flood zones. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. So with that said, I just have one last question, and we can move on to our last panel. I know it's a little bit longer than anticipated, but there's a lot to talk about, a lot of lessons learned, and obviously, this is something new as this flood has kind of took us in a different direction. So, Major General, I just want to ask you a question on how you guys deploy. Right? There seems like there's two different organizations.

Your Department with the volunteer, the guard. How do you guys activate and work simultaneously as regrouping these resources, right? Hopefully, you never do, but I know they're there. How do you guys deploy and work together to respond to these emergencies as they're called upon?

Yeah, sure. So we have great capacity and capability across the entire depth of breadth of the organization. I think you're talking about our state guard, which volunteers auxiliary. They represent a little less than 5% of our headcount.

Okay.

They also represent probably less than 1% of our actual capacity and capability. We generally deploy them, and some were actually deployed on this operation. We use them as liaison officers and county EOCs. They backfill our headquarters in certain critical places where folks might be deployed out in the field and they come in and backfill us. So they provide a critical role for sure. It's just the general types of capabilities that we required to deploy on this operation. They weren't needed.

Okay, great. And with that, I think I lost the rest of my colleagues. It's been a long day. But thank you all for joining us today and sharing your thoughts and suggestions moving forward. So with that, we'll move it on to our last panel. Let's first hear from our Central Valley Board President, Jane Dolan. President Dolan, you may begin.

Good afternoon and thank you. This doesn't sound like it's on for me, but I hope it is for you. Thank you for staying here.

Thank you.

I took my notes and I've truncated them, but I would look forward to a longer conversation at any point that can be arranged. I'm Jane Dolan. I'm the President of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board. We are an entity that was strengthened and recreated and renamed by the Legislature in 2007 and then formalized in more detailed actions by statutes in 2008. We represent and govern by permitting, oversight, and implementation, encouragement.

The great Central Valley of California, which across the United States is considered one of the two most vulnerable flood prone areas, your Central Valley, our Central Valley, and the Louisiana Coast. The answer to whether or not we were prepared is both yes and no.

We saw that the flood infrastructure systems, the dams, the weirs, the bypasses, and the levees that have adequate maintenance and have had the opportunity to have improvement from a system that is 50 to 100 years old, performed as expected, and provided safety and resilience and opportunity for evacuation. The areas that did not, did not do so well. But I also want to point out what we all know is that our reservoirs were very low and that really helped.

So the next atmospheric river that comes will not have that opportunity for that storage. Our rural and agricultural areas, as has been expressed, and we certainly know that, are definitely vulnerable and at risk. There is a plan. You directed that a plan be done. The first-ever plan of the Central Valley was enacted, prepared by DWR, extensive hearings, lots of stakeholder input, thoroughly reviewed, and adopted by the board in 2012. Updated in 2017 this is the third iteration, the second update.

The themes of this plan, and it's thorough, and it's 289 pages. You can have it if you want. We have a four-page outline that I would like to leave with you so that you can see what it is there. The themes are climate resilience, performance, and alignment with the other state programs that have the word water or flood within them.

We are a partner with our great other partner, the Department of Water Resources, and all that we do and all that they do with flood management and floods. Our greatest opportunity in the future to address these three issues is to widen our floodplain, give a space for floodwaters to go so that it's not in people's homes, not in our critical infrastructure, not across our evacuation routes of highways, and not where people are in harm.

We can do that through investing in our very slow-going update of the designated floodways so that we can have better land use planning and we can have a better identification of where floodwater can be. And that would be a storage as well. It would be both ground-level storage, but also groundwater storage as well. And we have identified that it can contribute to the groundwater recharge that is so essential in the San Joaquin Valley.

Our flood system has resources, but not enough to enact what needs to be done, what we know needs to be done, and to adequately operate and maintain our district, our system. We base this plan. We based all of our actions on this climate change study that's done. It's been improved. It's excellent of course, it always needs to be reviewed, and we would certainly encourage you to continue to advocate to the Federal Government.

Your Central Valley Flood Protection Board is a nonfederal sponsor with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They've been a great partner. When they step up, they are stepping up and they perhaps can step up a bit more, in my humble opinion. I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you. I look forward to more future opportunities. Thank you for having this hearing. Thank you for inviting us. We have a lot of work to do together.

Yes, thank you. Our next witness is PG&E's Director of Emergency Planning and Response, Tracy Vardas. Director, you may begin.

Good afternoon, my name is Tracy Vardas. I'm the Director of Emergency Preparedness Response for PG&E. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. I'd like to talk a little bit about our response to this storm and provide you with an overview of the impacts that these storms had, not only on PG&E, but on our customers and the level of response that we mobilized.

So we'll go ahead on to our second slide, and I will begin by emphasizing, as always, that PG&E, safety is our number one and top priority. We work not just to keep our customers safe, but also our co-workers and the greater public. The metrics you see on this slide demonstrate just how extreme the weather we experienced was.

The heavy rain, snow, the localized flooding, the soil instabilities, the landslides, the road closures, and other hazards that we heard about from our local partners today presented us with a significant challenge for getting our customers' power back on. We are proud of the way that our company responded, however. Next slide, please. This is going to show you the different waves of the storms that we experienced.

So between December 30 through January 16, our state experienced seven storm waves that resulted in outages for approximately 2.8 million customers. Some of these customers went out, came back on, went back out again, and you can see that second storm wave. We had 751,444 customers that were impacted. That's a significant number, even with the significant number of customers that we serve. On December 31, we did activate our Emergency Operations Center to monitor these outages, restore power, and support our communities.

Our crews worked tirelessly to safely restore power as quickly as possible. Even with the difficulties our crews faced, on average, 95% of impacted customers had power restored within 24 hours. We formally deactivated our EOC on January 17. However, the work continues today. Next slide, please. This is just going to show you some pictures of some of the visual examples of the extensive damage this weather caused to our system in the State of California, the damage most frequently impacted our power lines.

It involved poles, crossarms, transformers, and other equipment. System-wide, we experienced 9,500 individual damage cases in these three weeks. That means that it's not just an event, that is a piece of equipment was damaged. So we had 95,000 locations and damage incidents. That is highly significant. Our most recent comparable storm had about 6,000 incidents. Next slide, please. So as you heard from all of our public safety partners here today, the historic weather required a historic response.

And we actually mobilized one of the largest storm responses that our company has ever experienced. Our crews were working 24 hours a day, seven days a week for those three weeks and beyond to restore power and to keep not only our coworkers safe, but our customers safe. At the peak of our storm response, we had approximately 7,200 dedicated personnel across our service territory working. This included contractors, mutual aid crews, and mutual aid contract crews from across the United States.

You can see on the slide there where we had heavily received mutual aid resources. We also got some contract crews down from Canada. We also had all of our emergency response centers opened. Not just our Emergency Operations Center, but five regional emergency operations centers and 19 operational emergency centers. PG&E organizes our response. Very similar to the State of California where we have our local levels and divisions responding. All the way up through our Emergency Operations Center we have storm prediction models.

You heard a lot about the weather models today. We actually have one ourselves called Storm Outage Prediction Project Models. That takes the weather impacts and the weather modeling from multiple entities puts it together with what we've experienced in the past to determine where our crews should go. Because we can model where our highest impacted areas are going to be, where we're going to see the most damage.

So we take our crews and those mutual aid crews and we place them in those areas based on that, what we call our SOP Model. We set up base camps, staging areas, and lay-down sites. We do that as close to impacted areas as possible. We had a large base camp that we set up very early on in the event down in Santa Cruz. And we'll show you some pictures from that.

These space base support staff provide food, emergency supplies, shower, field laundry, you name it, staging areas for our equipment. Next slide, please. Here's some of the impacts that we saw to our customers. We know it's important to get the power back on when it goes out. And throughout these storms, we had more than 30,000 outages. We define an outage as an interruption in electric service to one or more customer.

So we may have 30,000 outages, but we had 2.8 million customers at one time or another impacted and then restored from those outages. We had 48 counties in our service territory that were impacted. We have an extremely large service territory, as I'm sure you know. So 48 of the state's counties were impacted and that included 31 tribes. Of these impacted customers, four out of five customers had power restored within 24 hours. I'm sorry, within 12 hours. And approximately 95% saw restoration within 24 hours.

Next slide, please. We had access challenges. So as you heard from the local counties, when they started talking about the impact to their communities, their communities being isolated, their communities being evacuated, that also impacted our ability to access these damage incidents and these sites to be able to restore power. We reported 125 hazard incidents throughout our service territory. These included flooding, landslides, avalanches, evacuations, debris flow warnings, and more.

We were especially challenged in the City of Salinas and the counties of Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo. The hazards created safety issues just like they do for the general public. They also create safety issues for our employees and our crews out there. We had to pull out crews on a couple of occasions because of the safety issues.

We had a video embedded in here, but it was from YouTube and it can't be clicked on to start, but if you Google it, you're going to see a YouTube where we had somebody in a bucket truck where a tree came down, landed on the arm. Luckily, he was appropriately hooked into the bucket truck with all of his fall protection gear, but he was dangling from the bucket truck because that tree had impacted the arm. So we had to pull people out.

We could not impact their safety and their lives. We pulled them out just like those residents were pulled out in those high-hazard areas and had to wait until access was available to us to begin those restoration processes again. Next slide, please. During these storms, we supported our customers with additional resources. One thing I particularly am proud of is how we worked with our public agency partners and had a public-private partnership. We provided 7,100. Customers were supported by temporary generation.

That means we brought in large generators to be able to power small cities. We were able to provide some microgrids. We also worked with the local counties to help support them at their warming centers and shelters. We provided more than 8,000 go bags for customers. Those go bags included water, snacks, and battery packs. The battery packs were instrumental in them being able to charge their phones. We fulfilled more than 350 requests for small portable generators for our customers who were experiencing extended outage outages.

These portable generators were filtered through the local public safety partners, through the operational areas up to us. We were able to provide those portable generators directly to customers, and those are theirs. We didn't ask for them back. We provided them the generators with a fuel card so that way they could go and get fuel for those generators as needed. We reached out via direct phone calls to our Medical Baseline Program customers to offer support and additional resources. Next slide, please.

Beyond providing support, we wanted to make sure to keep our customers and communities informed. I'm an emergency manager. I started my career down at State of California Office of Emergency Services. And our mantra is, you provide information early and often. You want to make sure that your customers know what's going on. It doesn't matter if it's a public entity or a private company. It's really important that we provide that information.

So we actually sent approximately 6.2 million direct customer notifications, and those were to continuously update them on the restoration process and what they could expect so they could prepare. If their power is going to come on in a couple of hours, they can hang tight. If it's going to be 24 hours, they're probably going to want to go see if they can find a hotel. We held 17 media briefings and we also leveraged social media to get messages and videos out.

Our meteorologists were constantly providing information as well as our company leadership. We really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today, and I'll be happy to take questions at the end.

Thank you. Thank you. And our final witness is SMUD's Director of Distribution, Planning, and Operations, Maria Veloso Koenig. Director, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Committee Chairs and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting SMUD to be part of this important discussion. I'm Maria Veloso Koenig, the Director of Distribution, Planning, and Operations here at SMUD. We are the 6th largest community-owned not-for-profit electric service provider in the country, and we've been providing low-cost, reliable, and clean electricity to the Sacramento region for more than 75 years. Today, we have about 645,000 customers and we serve a population of 1.5 million people.

You've heard from previous speakers about the unprecedented nature of the January storms. Days of heavy rain, multiple instances of hurricane-force winds caused destruction, extensive damage to our equipment, and a record number of power outages for our customers. I'll talk about the impact of SMUD and our customers and how we supported them.

I'll also give you an insight into the largest power restoration effort in SMUD's history and how important our partnerships with the National Weather Service, the county and state OES, and other utilities are in preparing for weather events and responding to emergencies. Storm preparation is a year-round job. At SMUD, we have a robust vegetation management program where we prune and remove vegetation that threatens our infrastructure. We also have ongoing maintenance programs to inspect equipment in the field and proactively replace poles and underground cable.

Our partnership with the National Weather Service, especially the one here located in the Sacramento office, is extremely important. Weather forecasts alert us to potential wind and or storms, which are the triggers that really start our storm response preparation. This includes mobilizing staff for around a company to respond 24 by seven. Employee and public safety is our most important priority, and weather forecast helps us to take action to keep our crews and the public safe.

Until this year, we compared our storm damage and related outages to the January 2008 storm, which was the most significant storm in SMUD's modern history. The January storms were very much different and their impact much more severe. Storms typically bring down limbs and branches and occasionally entire trees, with the ground saturated from days of rain, hurricane-force winds, and number of entire trees down across our service area, it's been unlike any other event that we've experienced.

For SMUD, 2023 is now the measuring stick against in which we measure all future storms. In the first 10 days of 2023, we had 1,800 downed conductors or wires, which was six times more than what we had in 2008. There were more than 1,500 outages, double the number from the 2008 storm. We replaced more than 425 poles. And to put that into perspective, SMUD replaces about 1,200 poles each year as part of our regular pole replacement program.

We responded to more than 1,000 significant tree and vegetation issues. Most of those were to clear a hazard before our line crews could respond to get the power back on. All told, 599,000 of our customers lost power over the two-week period. Because of the storms. We had 9090% of those customers stored in less than 24 hours. The response to the January storms was the largest in SMUD's history.

Our Emergency Operations Center was quickly mobilized to coordinate SMUD's response and worked in partnership with the county and state Office of Emergency Services. We also sent staff to be in the county OES office for coordination purposes. It's always all hands on deck at SMUD during storm response, and this one was definitely our largest-ever response effort. We had over 100 crews working in the field around the clock. We had 39 external crews, either contract crews or mutual aid from other utilities.

That's more than ever before and we can't thank them enough for lending us a hand. While we had more staff than ever before, restoration takes time, as other speakers have alluded to, especially when we had 1,500 outages, many of which required tree work, before we can assess the damage to our electric system and repair it. Some jobs involved replacing multiple poles. Each pole replacement is a significant construction job, taking a crew an average of 8 hours to complete. Weather also hampered the effort.

It's unsafe to put our crews up in a bucket when winds exceed 40mph. We saw winds over 70mph in our service area for extended periods of time. Flooding and evacuation in parts of southern Sacramento County meant that our crews couldn't get access into the damaged area and make the repairs. Power outages are never convenient and we know the longer ones are especially difficult.

When we knew customers were going to be out of power overnight, we called to let them know so that they could make arrangements, and we called them with regular updates. We went to great lengths to support the most vulnerable in our community. We called all of our customers who are on a MED Rate, and these are customers who are with essential medical equipment. We also proactively called customers on our low-income assistant rate. These included calls with updates on our estimated restoration times.

Our strategic account advisors also made proactive calls to our business customers. In partnership with Rayleigh's and the Salvation Army, we delivered bags of essentials, including food, water, blankets, and flashlights, to our most vulnerable customers. We also made welfare checks to our MED Rate customers that we were not able to reach. While many of these customers wanted to stay in their homes, some needed a little extra support.

For example, we delivered dry ice in a cooler to a diabetic customer who wanted to stay home but needed a way to keep her insulin cold. St. John's Shelter for Women and Children was also impacted by a complex power outage that involved several poles that had gone down. Recognizing that these situations are already very difficult for these families, SMUD arranged hotel rooms and food for these women and their children for a night while the damage was repaired and power was restored.

In conclusion, the January storms were the worst in SMUD's history, and we're incredibly grateful for our tireless employees, the mutual aid we received from other utilities, and the coordination with state and local emergency response. While we're still analyzing all the work or all the data from the storm, our staff and our board members are working to determine what steps we can take now to even better be prepared for the next major storm. Thank you.

Thank you, Director. And on that note, I do have a question for you can you share how the lessons learned from PG&E's wildfire and public safety power shutoff events have influenced your disaster response generally? Lessons learned, so to speak.

So as far as our service area within the valley, none of our neighborhoods are part of the tiered structure within the state. But with that said, we have reviewed PG&E's Wildfire Mitigation Plan, looked at some of the technologies that they have employed or are employing to mitigate the risk of wildfires. So we're looking into possibly implementing some of those strategies within our service area.

You have any questions, Carlos? And just one more question. Since we have both the PG&E SMUD here, how do you guys describe your mutual aid response that was called upon during this emergency with the floods? Your coordination working together on these response.

SMUD has several mutual assistance agreements with different utilities and different organizations. And so having those in place ahead of time is really beneficial because as we're doing our emergency planning and emergency response planning activities, we know who we would be able to call on and we could reach out to those entities ahead of time to give them a heads up.

Okay, thank you.

Yes. So what I want to add is it was fairly epic. It was fairly wonderful, actually. Our mutual aid partners, we do have the agreements in place. We go through the California Emergency Utilities Association to assist us within the State of California, and then we have the western regional mutual assistance groups outside of California that we can pull upon.

We were able to tap into Southern California Edison resources very early on, and they were able to come and they pre-staged with our crews because based on that SOP Model that I was discussing, we realized very early that we were going to need resources from outside our own home. We also saw that there were some San Diego Gas and Electric individuals that had come up and if I'm not mistaken, to assist SMUD.

And at the time that they got here and they were on the ground in Sacramento, they weren't needed. So we picked them up and we put them over. I can't remember if we sent them to Stockton or Santa Cruz, but we used those resources. They came in, they staged with our folks, they worked right alongside our folks. And we are extremely grateful for all entities. And not only do we use mutual aid crews from outside our areas, but sometimes those partners will release their contractors.

So they keep contractors in their hip pockets. So if they have a storm or if they have an event, they can use them. They released them so that those contract crews could come to California and support our work.

Okay, great. Good to know. With that, no other questions, we will go ahead and end our third and last panel. Thank you for your presentations and your information. I really appreciate it. And with that, so now we'll move on to our last portion will be our public comment. Not sure if. Yeah, you can just leave it there. We'll get it for me.

Okay.

With that, we'll go ahead and public comment. Anyone here in the audience? Public comments? I see we have someone there. Go ahead, sir. Good. Do we have the microphone on? I don't know if we heard him.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Fred Vargas here with Fire and Flood Emergency Services, a very unique and specialized company out of Canada. They've got its start in the energy sector where they're used to using large pumps, large hoses, and using massive amounts of water and deploying to floods and to other such incidents. Here we were, the company that was called out from Canada that the representative from PG&E mentioned, and we're honored to have their trust.

PG&E is to be commended for thinking not only outside of the box, but outside of the country. And we were able to bring a team of 12 to service the area in San Carlos and set up 1300ft of Tiger Dam flood mitigation barriers. So the company is very excited to be servicing in California and looking forward to partnering with other public safety entities and having yourself and other Committee Members and others to their location in Zamora at the Matchbook Winery. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate it. We have someone else next.

Mr. Chair Member, good morning, or good afternoon, I should say. It's been quite a hearing. Really appreciate the Committee here having the holding hearing today on this important issue. Our agency was formed by the Legislature in response to catastrophic flooding that was caused by a series of atmospheric rivers in 1955 that killed 40 people in our part of California. And for decades we've worked to reduce flood risk through investments in water management and flood protection infrastructure.

These days, we're working with the Scripps Institute and others to advance our understanding of atmospheric rivers, their effects, both good in terms of water supply availability, but also bad and dangerous in terms of increased flood risk. And as we know, our climate extremes are becoming increasingly volatile.

We know that we have to operationalize those insights that we're gaining from the science by reinvesting and retooling our existing infrastructure to make sure that it's up to the challenges of tomorrow's climate. For us, we're designing an atmospheric river control spillway at our dam, which is the fifth largest in the country. That improvement to our dam will significantly enhance flood risk reduction for the almost 200,000 Californians who live along the Yuban Feather Rivers in our part of California.

But it's not the only project of its kind. There are other dam safety and climate resilience projects proposed by local agencies up and down the state. The State of California can play an important role in making those projects a reality. In the multi-year budget appropriations that were advanced as part of last year's budget, the Legislature committed to providing funding for those years. We were glad to see that funding maintained in the Governor's January Budget Proposal.

So whether it's this year's budget conversations or conversations surrounding potential natural resources and flood bonds, we'd encourage you to keep these important projects in mind. Thank you very much for your time and thank you for today's hearing.

Thank you very much. Anyone else in the hearing room? Public comment? Seeing none, I guess we'll go over to our phone lines. Don't know if anybody is on the line for public comment. Do we have operator available?

Thank you. For public comment, you may press one and then zero. That is one and then zero. If you'd like to have public comment, and we will go to line 23. Your line is open.

Good. My name is Artie Valencia and I'm commenting on behalf of Restore the Delta. Currently, Stockton area is home to 800,000 people and is ranked one of the most diverse cities in California Due to decades of disinvestment, the city's only defense against flood are decade-old leak-prone levees. Federal studies find that the levees are subject to bursts with enough runoffs in the mountains as they move down and northward along the San Joaquin, thus inundating the city with 10 to 24-inch feet of water.

This is a humanitarian disaster that can be just as concerning as Hurricane Katrina. This floodwidth only increases with climate change and sea level rise due to increased rainfall and runoff in the San Joaquin Watershed compared to the Sacramento Watershed. The main thing stopping Stockton from implementing floodplain restoration projects and levee infrastructure is a lack of funding.

$40 million were cut by Governor Newsom for multiple flood protection projects like floodplain restoration, and the money was set to pay for nine floodplain reconnection projects that would help protect Stockton upstream. We also saw that flood risk emergency services are not prepared to inform folks on flooding, and we need to engage more with this topic and ensure that urgent information is reaching folks in rural areas and addressing language barriers, as well as provide live information on road closures, freeways, and so much more.

There's a disconnect here. A lot of the community in my community were seeking me out for help to take care of flood related damages, and that's not particularly my area. I do deal with flood, but not with emergency services, so I had to step in and really learn how that works. But I think there is a disconnect with the community here and we need to improve the communications within these spaces.

People still don't know how to evacuate or what the procedures are or even simple flood preparedness. We're not prepared, and we've also had issues with protecting and sheltering our own house populations here, and they were inches from being flooded as they reside near the levees of our town. And this is where they have been pushed to and there's been no action to protect them.

Thank you for your time and I hope that you consider my comments to further implement better telecommunication via social media or in-person to get this information and have it accessible to these people so that they are prepared and knowledgeable to handle this situation the next time it comes. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Go on to the next person, if we have somebody.

Thank you. Line 22, your line is open.

Good morning, Chair and Members. Martin Radosevich, representing Santa Clara Valley Water District, also known as Valley Water. We're the regional water supply and flood management and street stewardship agency for Santa Clara County. Back in January and February of 2017, there was a series of atmospheric rivers and storms that saturated the Bay Area. Valley Water's Reservoirs filled and spilled as they were designed to do.

However, Anderson Dam, which is our largest reservoir in Santa Clara County, has a really small outlet that impacts the ability to rapidly draw down the reservoir. With the ground saturated and the additional rain flowed through the watersheds unchecked, it flooded parts of San Jose. It displaced 14,000 residents and impacted mostly disadvantaged communities. It also caused about $75 million in damaged homes and businesses. Due to this new normal, Valley Water needs a larger dam outlet that's seismically retrofitted. We're currently working on that.

And to respond to these challenges caused by these atmospheric floods, we really urge the Legislature to invest more in dam safety and flood protection statewide. Thank you so much for everything you're doing, and we'll send more detailed comments as well.

Thank you very much. Go on to the next person if we have someone, operator.

Line 19, your line is open.

Hello, my name is John Cain. I am the Senior Conservation Director at River Partners. River Partners is a conservation group that restores floodplains and expands floodways along California's rivers. And as President Dolan of the Flood Board said, this expanding floodways will be necessary to accommodate the bigger floods that we can expect with climate change. And I just wanted to point out that and reiterate that expanding floodways has multiple benefits, including significant water supply benefits.

Our restored habitat, restored vegetation on the floodplains, uses significantly less water than irrigated crops on marginal floodplains and creates the opportunities for groundwater recharge and very importantly, creates the opportunity for more flexible operation of upstream reservoirs. The previous speaker from Santa Clara County Water District talked about the need to increase reservoir outlets capacity. You can't do that unless you have expanded floodways. And that's exactly what River Partners is working on in conjunction with many state agencies. We're very grateful for state support.

Last year, the Legislature actually allocated $40 million to the Wildlife Conservation Board for projects in the San Joaquin Valley. And unfortunately, the Governor's initial budget has cut that out and we hope that you can restore that funding. Lastly, I just want to let you know that we are having field trips in the Southport project and at the Dos Rios project in Modesto, and we'll be looking to invite you all and your staff to come see what multi-benefit floodplain restoration projects look like. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Operator, we'll go on to the next one if we have somebody.

Thank you, and we have no further public comments in queue.

Okay, thank you very much. So that said, any comments? Questions? Members? Carlos, Assembly Member Villapuda.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Comment?

I know I was kind of in and out, but I was listening in my office, and what I hear a lot was, you know, worst in history, largest ever. You know, and I hate to say that, you know, we, we've been down this road before, but I don't know if this is going to be, are we going to be facing?

That we haven't seen the worst yet, right? And in my district, numerous studies have pointed out that the Central Valley in my district, you heard someone just talk about the Delta particularly, is one of the most regions in the nation that will see catastrophic flooding. And some of the questions that I had, I didn't have time to ask, but how has California historically invested in flood infrastructure, and where have we underinvested in areas? And what are the high risk? I mean, obviously, you've heard.

I'm trying to push for a flood bond, but I'm just trying to figure out how do we prevent this from our future floods coming. How do we reinvest? Where should we reinvest? We had a lot of experts come up and speak. And I just don't think that the worst is over and not even saying that, but we need to prepare for the worst. Assume that the worst is going to come. And you've seen cities shut down, you've seen people out of power.

And I'm glad our local OES and I got to give them credit, they did a lot of work. They were invested in our community. I was on several calls with them and they're doing the best that they can. But I think that at the end of the day, we need to figure out how we do better. It just seems that we're always following the same footsteps and not really getting things done that we should, we need to invest.

In six months, we'd be talking about fires, right? But then we're back here talking about floods. It's just something that we keep going around in circles. So thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Assembly Member. Notes are well taken. Obviously, I look at this, as I've said earlier, this is a disaster-prone state, right? We're going to have some type of disaster, whether it's the fires, the floods, and my biggest thing is the earthquake. Right?

If we have that earthquake during the middle of the floods that are happening, levees are probably going to break. Talk about flooding. What that's going to do to our infrastructure, our roads, our highways, and maybe even hospitals, right? So I think we need to start advocating more through the budget, the Governor, and others, to start allocating more funding to start building the resources and the personnel and the infrastructure in case we have those disasters. I mean, we're going to have them.

I shouldn't say in case we're going to have them. Unfortunately, with the earthquakes, they're going to be unpredictable. The fires, the floods, we kind of see when it's coming, right, the weather, the climate, all that kind of telling us. But earthquakes don't really give us no warning. It's just going to happen whether it's down up here or down in the southern part of the state.

But how do we start putting more money aside to these planners, these directors, OES, CAL FIRE, and others to get the resources out there, the boots on the ground, so to speak, because it's going to happen. And I look at it as like an insurance policy. We buy insurance on our houses, our cars, right? In case something bad happens. We have it to take care of us. We need to look at California that way. An insurance policy advocating more funding to these resources to have.

Hopefully, we never have to reason, but if we do, we have the preposition we have the funding, we have staff, everybody available throughout the state, and respond to these disasters. And really, California being a role model to provide disaster response and planning moving forward. So with that, it's a very informative hearing. Thanks, everybody, for attending, whether in person or via video. A lot of lessons learned. We'll continue to make California better by having these types of hearings and getting us to a better place.

With that, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.