QuickTake:

A new software system that the state has shared with counties eliminates the mapping work that the county had to do before sending out fire-evacuation notices. The result should be timelier evacuation notices — at a time when every minute counts.

Lane County’s wildfire evacuation notices can go out 20 minutes earlier to residents in affected areas, giving people more time to leave when safety and lives are on the line.

The head start comes through the state’s contract with Genasys Inc. for software that helps counties eliminate the time needed to map out evacuation zones before sending the information out to the public. The Oregon Department of Human Services contracted with the company and made it available to all of the state’s 36 counties and nine federally recognized tribes. 

“It’s going to cut about 20 minutes of time,” Tiffany Brown, Lane County’s emergency manager, said Wednesday in a briefing to county commissioners about the wildfire season. 

That time savings comes because the county no longer has to spend time mapping out the shape of the evacuation zone that is shared with dispatchers, who then send the evacuation notice to the public.

Under the prior system, Brown said, that extra time came due to the extra work involved. That required calling a mapping technician, giving them the information and parameters of the evacuation area, creating a shape and validating it, Brown said.

“It has just been the reality of how we get the evacuation notice out,” Brown said.

The Genesys software, called EVAC, stands for Everyday Visual Awareness for Communities.”

In a release that DHS issued in September about the new contract, other county officials across Oregon praised the improvement, including Nick Vora, Union County’s emergency manager. 

“Changing, exporting, and adding evacuation zones for alerts used to be slow and complicated,” Vora said. “While there are many great mapping tools out there, they often made it time-consuming to update evacuation zones and get them ready for emergency alerts. It could take 15 to 30 minutes to make these changes and load them into the alert system. With Genasys, however, the process is much faster. You can select and adjust an area and get it ready for alerts in just a few minutes.”

The cost of the state’s five-year contract for the software is $5.5 million, with one year paid by the Oregon Department of Emergency Management, said Sara Campos, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Human Services.

Ben Botkin covers politics and policy in Lane County. He has worked as a journalist since 2003, most recently at the Oregon Capital Chronicle, where he covered justice, health and human services and documented regional efforts to combat fentanyl addiction. Botkin has worked in statehouses in Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma and, of course, Oregon. When he's not working, you'll find him road tripping across the West, hiking or surfing along the Oregon Coast.