FORT BRAGG, CA., 8/17/26 — The earthquake hit at 10:44 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 5, 2024, magnitude 7.0, somewhere off the Mendocino coast. Eleven minutes later the tsunami warning came with a number attached: the first wave was expected at 11:10.
That left fifteen minutes.
What happened in those fifteen minutes is written down, minute by minute, in a report the Fort Bragg Police Department took to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee two weeks later. At 10:56, an officer pulled into Noyo Beach and started running Hi-Lo — the yelping two-tone growl a patrol car makes when it is trying to move a neighborhood in a hurry. He also reported something in passing that ended up in the record: the tsunami siren sounded for six to eight seconds.
Noyo Beach was clear at 11:01. The officers moved to Ocean Lake Mobile Home Park and cleared it by 11:05. At 11:06 they started on Pudding Creek Beach and Glass Beach. At 11:10, on schedule, an officer watched the first surge come into Pudding Creek, maybe two feet of it.
In the city’s own timeline of that morning, the warning came by cars, street by street, with an officer leaning on a siren.
At 11:24 the city fired up VEOCI, the software where its emergency operations center lives. That was fourteen minutes after the water arrived, and the after-action report is unsentimental about why. “A staff member should be designated to open VEOCI and begin monitoring immediately,” it says. “Many critical users had difficulty logging into VEOCI due to password issues or unfamiliarity.”
Eight months before any of this happened, the Fort Bragg City Council adopted a plan for exactly this situation.
It’s a serious document, 49 pages, and it answers most of the questions you would think to ask. It has a grid showing which department does what once the emergency operations center is running. Alert and warning — the job of telling people a wave or a fire is coming — belongs to the Police Department, with the city manager and the fire department as backup.
The mysterious Annex B
The plan doesn’t explain how any of that works. When it gets to the part where a warning actually reaches a human being, it hands off. “Details about public alert and warning can be found in Annex B: Alert and Warning.”
Annex B is not attached to the plan in the city’s records system. It is not in the copy the city posts on its own website either — 49 pages that name Annex B once, as a pointer, but then never delivers it.
So on Aug. 4, the Voice asked the city manager for the document. Four minutes later City Manager Isaac Whippy handed the question to his police chief. “Chief, Please provide Roger with the requested information.”
Chief Eric Swift went and looked. On Aug. 7 he wrote back: “I could not find the annex that you mentioned from the City Council meeting.” By Aug. 10 the search had left the building entirely — “The County Emergency Services Office is researching the Annex” — and there it sat until Swift called on Friday afternoon with an answer that was simpler than any filing problem.
“A very good reason you couldn’t find it is because we never completed it,” he said. “So we are working on it currently.”
He wanted to be clear that the absence of the page is not the absence of the work. “It still stands, the alerts and warning piece. We still are able to do those,” he said. “We just don’t — we didn’t finish or finalize that written piece in Annex B.”
Which is fair, and which is also the whole problem in miniature. The city can warn you. What it has never finished writing down is who, exactly, does that.
Where warnings live
Ask what channels the city uses for warnings, and you get a list of places to look. Swift’s own list runs to the city website, the Police Department’s Facebook page, the county website, a couple of local FM stations, Caltrans and tsunami alerts. The plan is blunter: “The City EOC also utilizes the County’s Nixle alert system to provide alert and warning messages to the public within the City limits in the event of an imminent threat requiring the public to take a specific action.” Mendocino County runs Nixle through the Sheriff’s Office and the Office of Emergency Services — the county’s own feed publishes under the Sheriff’s Office name. Residents sign up through the county.
Nearly every channel on Fort Bragg’s list is either somebody else’s system or a place a resident has to think to go and look. Not one of them is a way for Fort Bragg, on its own authority, to make a phone buzz.
The plan assigns alert and warning to a department, not a person. The city manager is both the director of the emergency operations center and the city’s public information officer — the person running the response is also the person supposed to explain it to the public. Swift said that is still how it works. “The responsibility matrix still describes how it works day to day,” he told me. “And the roles still stay as they were listed in 2024.”
The same after-action report has a view about that. “In the first hour following an emergency, the City Manager should find a safe space to direct operations from… The only thing the City Manager should be doing is making decisions and keeping a ‘1000 foot view’.”
When the Voice reached out to the City Council in a July email, two members answered within hours, and both sent me to the city manager. Mayor Jason Godeke said the city had spent “the last couple of years” on the plan, “re-establishing and defining EOP roles and procedures,” and pointed me at Whippy and Swift. Tess Albin-Smith, a retired Cal Fire forester traveling out of the country, named Whippy too. Neither could say who publishes an emergency message in Fort Bragg, which is not evasion so much as evidence.
Alerta de emergencia
The gap widens if you don’t speak English. The plan is explicit that “Nixle alerts should be issued in English and Spanish,” and it explains that a quarter of Fort Bragg homes speak a language other than English, and 33.2% of the city is Hispanic or Latino. Radio chain Bicoastal Media turned off the local AM station, KDAC 1230, in 2025. Swift says the commercial FM options are not optimal.
“They only have Spanish speakers at a certain time and a certain day,” he said. “So if we were to do this, when we send it out in Spanish, unless it’s during those times, you know, it just takes a little while longer for them to get it translated.”
Does that hurt the city’s ability to reach Spanish speakers in an emergency?
“Yes, I will say yes, it does impact to a certain degree.”
The Spanish half of a Fort Bragg emergency alert, in other words, depends on the day of the week and on who happens to be working at a radio station.
There is one more line in the plan worth reading before deciding how much an unfinished annex matters. The basic plan goes back to the council for formal review every three years. The annexes do not. They are “revised as needed and are not subject to formal review.”
So no one was ever going to call for Annex B. It was not going to appear on an agenda, or draw a vote, or turn up missing in front of anybody. The plan calls the annexes “an extension of this EOP” — part of the adopted document, carrying the operational detail of how a warning reaches you, and answerable to nobody in public.
The council ordered alert procedures nearly two and a half years ago. The chief says the city is writing them now.
In the meantime, what worked on Dec. 5 was a patrol car at Noyo Beach at 10:56 in the morning, and an officer who did not need to look anything up.