Case Study: Santa Cruz Wildfire Annex

The Situation

When a wildfire is moving toward a jurisdiction, you don't have time to figure out who calls whom. Santa Cruz County had wildfire plans on paper. What they didn't have were operational tools — documents that told EOC staff exactly what to do in the first 72 hours without a senior manager in the room to interpret them.

Prior events had exposed the gaps. Eighteen-plus agencies couldn't coordinate effectively because nobody had mapped the coordination requirements before the fire started. The county needed planning documents that were designed for the actual people who would use them during an activation — not generic templates adapted from another jurisdiction's context.

What We Did

TLR ran five facilitated planning sessions over several months, pulling together a cross-section of the county's 18+ emergency management stakeholders each time. We weren't starting from a blank template. We were mapping the workflows that already existed, identifying where they broke down in prior events, and building new documents around how the EOC functions.

The centerpiece was a first 72-hours visual workflow — a single-page operational guide designed so a new EOC staff member could pick it up during an activation and understand what to do without needing someone to translate it for them. Five additional planning tools were built around it: resource request procedures, coordination protocols, activation decision trees, and inter-agency communication sequences — all designed to hold up under stress.

The sessions also produced something just as valuable as the documents: a documented gap analysis from prior wildfire events. The county now knows exactly where coordination failed and why. That history is built into the new protocols.

"A wildfire annex that requires an experienced manager to interpret it isn't an annex — it's a liability. We built documents for the people who will actually be holding them."

What We Delivered

First-72-hours visual workflow — single-page EOC operational guide for Day 1 activation, usable without senior staff interpretation
5 additional operational planning tools — resource request procedures, coordination protocols, activation and demobilization decision trees
18+ agency coordination map — roles, handoffs, and communication sequences documented across all participating county agencies
Gap analysis from prior events — documented coordination failures from previous wildfire activations, addressed in the new protocols
5 facilitated planning sessions — structured process generating county buy-in across departments

What Changed

Santa Cruz went from generic templates to operational documents built around how the county's EOC functions. Staff know their roles because the documents describe those roles — not placeholder language that requires experienced interpretation.

The planning process surfaced coordination gaps that had existed since prior wildfire events — unaddressed, not because the county didn't care, but because there had been no structured forum to surface and document them. Those gaps are now built into the protocols rather than left to surface during the next activation.

Readiness Framework · Applied

The plan that works is the one staff can use during an incident — not the one that looks good on a shelf.

TLR's Readiness framework evaluates organizational capacity across six domains. Operational Capacity — the ability to execute under stress — was the primary gap here. The first-72-hours workflow directly addresses this: it removes decision dependency on senior staff who may not be available in the first hours of an activation. A plan isn't ready until it works without the people who wrote it in the room. The five facilitated sessions weren't just process — they created the county-wide ownership that makes the documents stick after the consultant leaves.

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Insights before
the event makes gaps obvious.