Making Essential Safety Investments

The Challenge

Situated in California’s Central Valley, Yuba County has a highly competent and cohesive Emergency Management team that is always willing to adopt new tools that can help protect their community from wildfires and other natural disasters. To better understand exactly where and how the team could most effectively respond to community needs, the emergency managers required a data-driven tool that could quantify the team’s priorities and organize their data to present it to stakeholders.

Partnership with Ladris

To address these challenges, the Yuba County Office of Emergency Services (OES) established a partnership with Ladris, initially using the Evac and Fire modules. The County later adopted OEZ, Ladris’ free and open evacuation zone management system, understanding the importance of improving community safety through any available resources. To meet Yuba County’s objectives, Ladris worked with OES to further tune their Fire configuration, adjusting how potential fire impacts on the built environment could be best communicated to untrained audiences and expanding the service area to include neighboring Nevada County to allow modeling of cross-jurisdictional fires. 

Once OES was well-equipped with data-driven models, Ladris supported them in presenting fire modeling research to other stakeholders, including County fire districts, law enforcement, the Fire Safe Council, and the County Board of Supervisors. In addition to advanced fire modeling, the County used Ladris to identify high-risk areas to guide mitigation effort decisions. 

Continued Impact 

The Yuba County OES continues to partner with Ladris on life-saving preparedness work. The Emergency Management team’s outstanding work was recently recognized with a California State Association of Counties (CSAC) Challenge Award for its youth emergency preparedness program, “We’re Not Scared, We’re Prepared!”, recognizing the County’s innovative efforts to teach young children practical disaster readiness skills. Ladris has also collaborated with the Sheriff’s Department on some evacuation preparedness efforts, including the County’s annual Pumpkin Festival, concerts at the Hard Rock Casino, and events at the Toyota Amphitheatre.