Wildfire Forecast and Threat Intelligence Integration Center: forecasted extreme, life-threatening fire weather conditions.
What changed between versions
The Center must now proactively coordinate with the National Weather Service and the California State Warning Center to share forecasted extreme, life-threatening fire weather conditions to ensure wide distribution of information for all potentially impacted agencies.
The Center must create a written report analyzing extreme, life-threatening fire weather conditions and disseminate it to the California State Warning Center. The report must include: whether NWS issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation or Red Flag Warning, wind speeds, relative humidity, fuels status, a narrative of the threat with recommended protective actions, geography of the impacted area including a list of counties, and urgency and timeliness of action.
The Center must create and disseminate, via the standardized emergency management system structure established under Section 8607, a training program for operational areas to interpret the report analyses and educate operational area emergency managers on the urgency, information, and potential actions to take upon receipt of a report.
The California State Warning Center must proactively disseminate the report to operational area duty officers and public safety answering points within the impacted geography. Office of Emergency Services duty officers must proactively make contact via phone, text, email, or radio with operational area duty officers when sharing the report.
The bill now explicitly authorizes the Governor to proclaim a state of emergency (Section 8625) or a local governing body to proclaim a local emergency (Section 8630) based on information contained in the written report, creating a direct link between the Center's analysis and emergency declaration authority.