Alameda's Disaster Readiness Has Gaps, Grand Jury Finds
The county civil grand jury says Alameda hasn't run a real emergency drill in nearly a decade, and only about one in four residents gets city alerts.
By The Alameda Pulse
Alameda's plan for the next big earthquake, flood or tsunami looks solid on paper. The problem, according to the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury, is that the city hardly ever practices it.
The grand jury's 2025-2026 report devotes a section to Alameda, titled "A Call for Readiness." It started with a resident complaint after the July 2025 tsunami advisory, the one that followed a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia. The complaint was simple. There are Tsunami Hazard Zone signs bolted to poles around town, and nobody ever told residents what to do about them.
Why emergency preparedness matters more on an island
The grand jury spelled out what living here actually means. Alameda has just over 79,000 people, 10.45 square miles of land, and more than 23 miles of shoreline. Much of it sits at or near sea level. The main island connects to everything else through exactly four bridges and two underwater tubes: Park Street, Fruitvale, High Street, Bay Farm Island, plus the Webster and Posey tubes. There's also the free water shuttle to Oakland, but a small boat isn't an evacuation route. That's a short list when tens of thousands of people need to move at once.
No real drills in nearly a decade
Here's the part that stings. Alameda's own Emergency Operations Plan says city staff should run one discussion-based exercise every year and a hands-on drill twice a year. The grand jury found the city hasn't done the hands-on kind at all, going back at least nearly a decade. Asked why, one public safety official told the grand jury "I don't really have a good answer."
The city also doesn't write after-action reports, the honest self-reviews agencies do after something goes sideways. Berkeley published a 24-page review after the December 2024 tsunami warning, with a survey of 1,600 residents and 16 fixes it planned to make. Alameda wrote nothing.
Alerts, sirens and the numbers
- About 20,000 Alamedans are signed up for AC Alert, the county's text and phone alert system. That's roughly one in four of us.
- The city hasn't held an in-person preparedness class since 2019. Oakland ran about 10 last year and has six more planned.
- Alameda has no emergency siren. Oakland and Berkeley both do. Several city staff told the grand jury Alameda's been looking into it.
- Roughly 300 residents are trained CERT volunteers.
It isn't all bad news. The City Council approved a new Emergency Operations Plan in April, the first real update since 2019, and best practice is every five years. The new version adds a tsunami section and pre-written message templates, so nobody's drafting an alert from scratch mid-crisis.
What happens next
The City Council and the mayor have 90 days from receiving the report to respond to all 12 findings and 9 recommendations, and that response is public. In the meantime, signing up for AC Alert takes about two minutes. If the city restarts those in-person trainings, we'll put them on our events page.
