From: Governor's Office of Emergency Services

RANCHO CORDOVA - For more than 50 years, California's emergency
response to earthquakes, floods, wildfires and other statewide
disasters has been managed from a building that is itself vulnerable
to disaster. That is about to change. Construction is nearly complete
on a state-of-the-art headquarters and State Operation Center
building near Sacramento.
Today, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services will hold a
dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. to dedicate the building. It is named
for former state Senator William P. Campbell who, throughout his
22-year legislative career, strongly supported emergency management
and public safety.
The event will also include speeches by OES Director Dallas Jones,
Sacramento County Supervisors Don Nottoli and Rodger Niello, as well
as three of the eight past OES directors who served the agency
between 1971 and 1998. Other honored guests in attendance include
legislators.
The event will be topped off by a procession of helicopters and
fixed-wing airplanes, which are being provided by multiple state
agencies which OES often calls upon in coordinating disaster
response. They include the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection, California Department of Justice, U.S. Coast Guard,
California Department of Justice, California Highway Patrol,
Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, Sacramento Police Department
and the California National Guard.
OES coordinates state-level emergency preparedness, response,
recovery and mitigation for a wide range of natural and human-caused
emergencies and disasters.
The agency maintains the state's 24-hour 'Warning Center,' which
stands at the ready to provide immediate support for local
responders.
OES also works hand-in-hand with the Federal Emergency Management
Agency to help California recover from major disasters.
The desperately needed office space will allow the agency to combine
its headquarters operation from seven, Sacramento-area buildings into
one. All OES headquarters employees will be able to work together,
under one roof for the first time in more than a decade. The existing
headquarters site now holds less than half of the agency's 458
headquarters employees.
The new, high-tech facility will replace the early-1950s,
cinder-block headquarters in South Sacramento. It will also enable
the agency to comply with more recent, stricter construction
requirements mandated of 'essential services' facilities as defined
in the 1968 Essential Services Building Seismic Safety Act. The act
applies to the State Operations Center. The agency's headquarters
will, for the first time, be located outside of a flood plain. Though
no floodwater has dampened its floors, floods have closed roads
leading to the headquarters and caused OES staff to prepare for
evacuation several times during severe winter weather, although it
was never necessary to actually evacuate.
Not only will the new building unite OES sections and branches into
one central location, and increase flood safety, it will provide
emergency workers with a more sophisticated telecommunications
system.
No longer limited by the former building's outdated electrical
wiring, OES' technology and telecommunications specialists have
arranged for the new building to feature its own, on-site telephone
service. The service will be used to maintain communications within
the building if lines to telephone company switches were ever
severed. Calls to outside emergency agencies would still be possible
through the new system, which is capable of satellite-to-wire and
satellite-to-radio transmission.
Further, the new site features a generator capable of keeping the
operation functioning in a power outage, and a second generator for
use if the first one were to fail.
'Most buildings, if they have an emergency generator, will keep maybe
a fourth of the building running,' said lead design architect Kris
Barkley, vice president of Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects. 'This
system is set up so that you can pretty much operate the entire
building and it would be almost the same as if the power weren't off
at all.'
The building itself is constructed of materials meant to withstand
natural disasters far greater than Sacramento has known in recorded
history.
The Senator William P. Campbell Emergency Services Building is made
up of two parts. The west wing holds executive, planning, and
disaster assistance offices, among others. The east wing is the
emergency response nerve center, housing the State Operations Center,
Warning Center, Law Enforcement Branch and Fire & Rescue Branch.
The executive office wing is a sleek and transparent two-story
structure of steel and glass with flexible open-office space to house
a majority of personnel. By contrast, the operations wing - which
houses the State Operations Center - has light entering primarily
from skylights. The visual focus is toward the center, rather than to
the outside. On the second floor, offices open to a mezzanine or
wrap-around balcony which encircles and overlooks the State
Operations Center, which is on the first floor below.
The high, solid white ceiling has the shape of an inverted triangular
prism which reflects and diffuses the sun's rays entering from
bordering skylights, to naturally light the working area.

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For more information contact:
Tom Mullins (916) 262-1843

EDIS-05-09-01 1624 PDT


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