Oakmont Village is one of California's largest 55+ communities — more than 5,000 residents in wildfire-prone Sonoma County, with significant access and functional needs across the population. When TLR engaged, the community had no formal evacuation plan, no exercise history, and no structured relationships with the local fire and emergency management agencies that would be responsible for supporting an actual evacuation.
The risk profile was double. Wildfire is the dominant threat in this part of Sonoma County — Oakmont sits in the hills east of Santa Rosa, in terrain that has burned before. But the community also sits near industrial corridors with hazardous materials exposure risk. A plan built only for wildfire would have been incomplete from the start.
The governance context added another layer. Informal neighborhood preparedness networks — Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) groups — were already active in parts of Oakmont, but they operated independently of the official Oakmont Village Association structure. Any planning process that didn't account for that dynamic would either alienate the MYN organizers or produce a plan the OVA couldn't operationalize. TLR had to hold both.
TLR led a six-month engagement that built the evacuation planning infrastructure the community lacked. We began with stakeholder interviews across OVA leadership, MYN organizers, and residents to map the governance dynamics and surface the AFN and access gaps that any credible plan would need to address — including the distinct situation of renters, who are often overlooked in HOA-driven preparedness structures.
We engaged Santa Rosa and Sonoma County Emergency Management directly, facilitating the agency coordination sessions that embedded shared roles, communication protocols, and resource expectations into the plan. Those relationships didn't exist in a formal structure before. They do now.
The work ran across three tracks simultaneously. The planning track produced a comprehensive Emergency Action Guide covering evacuation, shelter-in-place, AFN protocols, hazard-specific communication, and dual-hazard annexes. The exercise track stress-tested the plan with a dual-scenario tabletop — wildfire evacuation followed by a chemical spill inject — with 22 community leaders across all key functions. And the expansion track produced a Train-the-Trainer model so Oakmont could sustain preparedness education beyond the engagement without depending on TLR to deliver it.
When TLR completed the engagement, Oakmont had something it didn't have before: an evacuation plan built around who actually lives there. The 5,000+ residents include people with mobility limitations, medical dependencies, and varied access to information. Building AFN protocols into the plan structure — not as an afterthought annex, but as a core design element — is what makes it usable when it matters.
The three agency relationships mean that when an evacuation is called, local fire and emergency management already understand Oakmont's population profile and what the community needs. The dual-scenario TTX surfaced gaps that the planning process alone couldn't have found — the kind of decision-making breakdowns that only show up under pressure. Those gaps were documented and assigned for correction. The Train-the-Trainer model means the work compounds after TLR leaves, rather than eroding.
This engagement also resolved the MYN/OVA dynamic by creating a formal structure that both groups could work within. Informal preparedness networks are assets — but only if they're connected to the official response structure when an actual emergency occurs. That connection is now built in.