By Gavin Hung and Sean Yagi
On Aug. 18, the Office of Emergency Services (OES) for Santa Clara County sent out a series of text messages warning residents to evacuate their homes due to the impending dangers caused by the spreading California wildfires.
Cupertino Amateur Radio Emergency Service (CARES) field responder Tae Kang explains that the texts sent to Santa Clara County residents were in reality due to a communication error within the OES.
“The text messages were intended for the Santa Cruz County residents,” Kang said, “but inadvertently, [I’m] guessing it was just human error, they sent it to some residents here in [the] Cupertino [and] Saratoga area.”
Saratoga resident and senior Catherine Vo and her family had just gotten home from the grocery store when they received the false warning text.
“I wasn’t sure [whether the warnings were legitimate],” Vo said. “We were kind [of] far out [of the affected area] and they [OES] didn’t really follow up with anything. I was kind [of] shocked because ... we didn’t really know what to do because this had never really happened. There had been other fires but they had never been this close.”
However, Vo’s family decided to prepare for an evacuation regardless of the legitimacy of the text messages.
On the same day, Lynbrook High School junior Dylan Rances received a legitimate evacuation order and relocated from his home in Boulder Creek.
“At first, I wasn't worried until I saw how serious the fires were,” Rances said. “And then when I looked outside, I [saw] all the smoke and the air being so red, that I just started freaking out. And my first thought was, am I still going to be able to leave? Because my area is enclosed within these two roads. So if one road is blocked, I have to be forced to go into the other road, but if that road is blocked, I won't be able to leave at all.”
After receiving the evacuation order, the Rances family packed their belongings and moved out, eventually ending up in a Church converted to a shelter located in San Juan Bautista.
“My parents thought mostly about documents and things such as files,” Rances said. “And they told me to pack my clothes and things that I would need for school and all. I packed all my textbooks and some electronics that I could carry inside a backpack. And then I carried things that were close to me such as like, little Polaroid pictures that I thought I didn't want to lose.”
As part of their preparation, the Vo family packed emergency suitcases with essential supplies and prized possessions. For Vo, who frequently creates and collects pieces of art, the most difficult part of packing was choosing between essential supplies and her art.
“I just grabbed a couple of clothes to pack from my closet, electronics I kept really close by,” Vo said. “I have a lot of art I’ve done over the years, so I packed that up into garbage bags. I kind of just accepted the fact that even though [the art] is important to me, if I was put in the situation where I got the evacuation order and I didn't have time to collect more non-necessary pleasure things, then I’d just have to let them go because my family’s lives are more important and I wouldn’t want to put them in danger by worrying about my silly belongings.”
Kang also stresses the importance of preparedness for wildfires, stating that vigilance is paramount, especially due to the increased magnitude of wildfires in recent years.
“Urban fire preparedness is a relatively new [concept],” Kang said. “It wasn't even really in our vocabulary just a few years ago. We were more worried about earthquakes. Urban wildfires, who would have thought five years ago, ‘We're going to have a wildfire coming through Cupertino?’ But now, ... through watching other communities go up in smoke, unfortunately we've learned how realistic it is.”
Vo and her family are among those who have more recently discovered the risks of wildfires and how to mitigate them.
“I hesitate to take away life lessons from something that’s ruining people’s lives,” Vo said, “but I guess I’ve learned to be more prepared for [wildfires]. [At the very least we learned to] pack bags, and if anything happens just get ready and go.”
Moving forward, Kang hopes that the general population will become not only more educated on the subject of wildfires, but also more aware of such events taking place around them.
“We can't take for granted that people know the things that we know of what current events are happening,” Kang said. “That there's a wildfire over the hill, or that the high winds are going to cause PG&E to turn off the power. We learned that a lot of people are not only ill prepared, but ill informed. They just don't know. And the people who don't know are probably the people who need the most amount of help during an event.”