Naila Sfeir has been waiting for the call. The one that has been made to more than 350,000 San Diego homes telling families to evacuate - now.
The massive fires in Southern California are putting to test a new phone alert system and emergency officials throughout the state and region are taking notice.
San Diego County put its "reverse 9-1-1" system into place after the state's most destructive wildfire ravished parts of San Diego County four years ago. That fire leveled 4,847 homes and businesses and killed 15 people.
No one fully expected the phone system would be used so heavily - or used so soon.
The first evacuation call was made through San Diego's now two-year-old warning system at 10:35 a.m. Sunday after the Harris Fire broke out near the Mexico border. And by Tuesday afternoon, more than 350,000 additional calls had been made to the houses and apartments of more than half a million residents. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, the calls kept coming.
"We're getting a lot of use out of the reverse 9-1-1 system," said a weary Capt. Mike McNally with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, which has been creating the messages and coordinating the calls around the clock. "The system is being used almost non-stop."
Many other California counties, including Santa Clara County, however, still lack such telephone warning systems. Contra Costa County started its telephone warning system in the
mid-1990s and has used it during refinery leaks and smaller incidents, said Art Botterell, the community warning system manager for the county's sheriff's office.Santa Clara County is considering getting one, and officials will certainly be taking a close look at how it is working in Southern California, said Bruce Lee, interim director of the Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services.
The main stumbling block for many communities is price. It can be hard to get a county to approve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a system that is typically used very little, Lee said.
Although San Diego's disaster is far from being over, some Bay Area emergency services officials believe the reverse 9-1-1 system has already proven to be worth it.
"It's not a cure-all for public alerting, but it is a very important tool," Lee said. "With just a few actions, you can send out a lot of messages to a lot of people quickly. So it's very efficient."
Indeed, in the past, communities have relied primarily on their emergency broadcast systems - television and radio announcements - to alert the public about disasters. But those systems only work when residents actually have their televisions or radios on, if they even own a television at all.
The automated system, which cost San Diego County $320,000, is capable of making 264 calls per minute. It combines GIS mapping technologies with 9-1-1 calling. One of its major drawbacks is it does require functioning power and phone lines.
Fire crews have been alerting the sheriff's department which areas need to be evacuated, narrowing the evacuations down to certain neighborhoods. Messages are being recorded in English only, and are being tailored to meet the needs of those individual neighborhoods, spelling out where residents can flee to or roads that may be closed in their area.
This week, many of the evacuation calls made in San Diego have taken place before dawn, when most people have been sleeping rather than channel surfing. The message has varied from community to community, with some being told "be prepared" to leave. And others hearing the stern words "go now," followed by some evacuation instructions.
The department is crediting the system with saving some lives already, including a sleeping family startled awake by their evacuation phone call. By Tuesday afternoon, just one person had died in the San Diego County fires.
The county has also been using deputies with sirens to evacuate the neighborhoods, and helicopters have flown over some communities calling down to residents to flee right away.
But the calls have been invaluable, "and are continuing as I'm speaking to you," McNally said.
Dozens of square miles in both the northern and southern parts of the county are virtual ghost towns.
Things didn't go nearly as smoothly four years ago this week, when the Cedar Fire swept through the county and burned a record 273,246 acres and left some 4,847 structures in ashes.
County officials were heavily criticized for not giving the public advanced warning. More than two dozen people perished, and many of those who lost their homes had so little notice they were unable to grab even a few cherished possessions like family photos or homeowners insurance paperwork.
With the unpredictable nature of this week's fires, fire officials haven't been taking any chances. Calls were made to at least 18 different cities in the county. But by Tuesday afternoon, residents of Chula Vista, Solana Beach and some parts of Poway were told they could head back home.
Naila Sfeir, who moved with her family from the Bay Area to San Diego County several years ago, said it is nerve wracking every time the phone rings. But so far, her neighborhood in San Marcos has been spared.
"We're just sitting here watching the news," she said, "hoping and praying we don't get a reverse 9-1-1 call."
