Dr. Ingeborg Cox, a Winchester Canyon area resident, said that Channel 20, Santa Barbara County’s public access station, was showing a lot of reruns.

“When you don’t run up-to-date information, it makes people more anxious ... they’re left on their own to find out what’s happening.”

She also said the maps on the county website were lacking and felt that some of the inaccurate locations led to some false evacuations in her area.

When she and her husband dialed 211 to get more information about the fire, they were directed to a call center in Ventura.

“I would say, 'Can you tell me where the fire is? I’m seeing smoke.’ She couldn’t even tell me where Winchester Canyon was,” her husband, Vic, said.

Barbara Massey, a Winchester Commons resident, said that she and her husband evacuated, along with many other residents, after they received a reverse 911 call, which they believe was a false evacuation.

“No one has ever told us it was a mistake,” she said.

“It seemed like they weren’t prepared for this,” she said. “You expected a day or two of goofing off and then you expected them to get their acts together.”

“I was really unimpressed by the coverage and there was very little valid information,” she said.

Massey said she was impressed, however, with the county’s effort to distribute masks at the Camino Real Shopping Center.

“They need to talk to the citizens and see what they want. We need to look at it and see what could’ve been done,” she said.

Turning to the web
When concerned residents couldn’t find updated maps or fresh information from the county, many turned to local news outlets.

“When something comes up, that’s when our website should thrive,” said Peter Sklar, publisher of edhat.com, which saw an influx of traffic during the Gap Fire.

After the fire started, Sklar said he wrestled with some lofty questions about how the event should be covered. “We were asking ourselves, 'Who’s responsibility is this? Is it a private one? Is it a public one?’”

He said the goal of the site is to gather and exchange information and the site was soon filled with first-hand reports.

“We’re a democratic version of the news. We’re hoping to get some good ideas from people” on Monday, he said, when a public forum will be held at 6 p.m. in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Central Library, sponsored by EdHat. “The purpose is to have people in Santa Barbara express what it is they want from public information in an emergency and hopefully we can get the government to react to that. ...It’s really consensus meeting,” he said.

He also called for compassion from the county.

“They have to understand that people are in their homes and their looking at the fire on the hill and they’re really scared. Maybe the county thinks they need a certain kind of information but they need to be understanding to what people are going through,” he said.

Another site that proved an outlet for lacking information was independent.com, which saw an increase in its traffic, up to 36,000 visitors, five times the norm.

“We were trying to be a daily paper,” said Nick Welsh, executive editor of the Santa Barbara Independent. “A newspaper justifies its existence when events like this occur.”

Welsh said the website had 60 stories online within a matter of days.

“The community really responded to that,” he said.

His staff had gotten the most feedback from the maps on the website, and said he wished the county could’ve published maps earlier in the process.

Officials’ take
But county officials say they feel the outcome was good, considering the circumstances.
“Anytime there’s a fire, there’s always surprises. It’s never perfect,” said Salud Carbajal, First District Supervisor.

“When you compare what happened with Zaca, the one area that’s always a challenge is information.”

Carbajal said that the county had issued a “memorandum of understanding” to many of the radio stations, which determined that many of the stations would embrace redundancy. “Those proved to be really effective for the most part,” he said.

Eli Iskow, public information officer for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, said “there’s method to that madness for sure,” when asked about redundancy from the broadcast stations.

That was done to make sure people could tune in any time and get current information and it was repeated so it would be consistent, he said.

Carbajal said he only received six to eight emails expressing concern about fire information.
Multiple command centers between state, local and federal agencies, as well as Southern California Edison, Carbajal said.

Faster web updates with more information was what most of the public feedback had been, he said.

He said the county will meet once the Gap Fire has been extinguished and assess the communication.

City officials, too, were feeling the pressure for fresh information.

“I think the community had frustration about how timely info was,” said Dan Singer, Goleta’s city manager.

“Technically speaking, the fire never even came to the city but there’s no question that we were heavily impacted,” Singer said.

“But it really was a county operation and not a city operation.”

What’s needed
Vic Cox said more specific information would have been helpful.
“My point (in a letter) to the city manager and the mayor is that they should have a responsibility to point out the weaknesses to the county,” he said.

Cox said that he waited for fresh info to be released from the county, not the city.
“There was a lot of stuff that could’ve been useful that wasn’t put out by the powers-at-be,” he said.

Cox said he wished he had seen more transparency and timeliness with the coverage.

“Pay attention to the details if you’re going to share info and you should try to share as much as is reasonable that doesn’t put firefighters at risk,” he said.

In the future, Goleta will be considering creating a joint Emergency Operations Center with the county, a project the county seems eager to begin, and has already earmarked $7 million towards it.