EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

Should an emergency arise, the EOC will be activated to respond accordingly to the magnitude of the emergency. Azusa is located in a unique geographical location with a number of potential concerns; it is also located within the Disaster Management Area D in L.A. County. Depending on the magnitude of the emergency, the channel of coordination to respond would be Azusa’s EOC, L.A. County Operations Area EOC, California Office of Emergency Services Southern Region, and the California Office of Emergency Services.  The Azusa EOC department can communicate with L.A. County by satellite should regular communication systems not be available

Authorized to active the EOC are: Azusa City Manager, Azusa Police Chief, or the on scene manager of the disaster. The most common reasons to activate the EOC are: a significant earthquake causing damage in the city, an uncontrolled release or failure of the Morris Dam, State wide emergency or an impending or declared state of war emergency, major hazardous material incident, brush fires or severe weather, civil disturbances, a terrorist attack that impacts Azusa, pandemic, or emergencies that require commitment of resources from two or more cities for multiple days. In the event of a disaster, all city employees become disaster service workers. Staffing the EOC in a disaster are four core groups during full activation, comprised of department directors and/or their designees: (1) Operations consisting of fire/rescue, law enforcement, shelter, utilities, building & safety & public works; (2) Planning/intelligence do damage assessment and recovery planning; (3) Logistics work with resources, purchasing, procurement, I.T. support, transportation, personnel, facilities; (4) Finance/administration, work with cost recovery, compensation, cost analysis.

All city employees that make up these groups are required to take incident command system (ICS) online training through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) website. With this training, they will create a training baseline for all respondents, do local training exercises and move to County wide exercises. The Azusa Amateur Radio Communication Emergency Services (AACES) is a ham radio operators group of volunteer citizens that are prepared and trained to respond to the aid of the city with emergency communications in the event of a disaster. The goal is to increase the community participation with EOC workshops at future city events.  The city of Azusa hired Jennifer Wu in October 2021 as the new Emergency Services Coordinator who is housed at the Azusa Police Department. Jennifer Wu is responsible for the Office of Emergency Services in Azusa, police grants, police social media, and crime statistics for the police department. 

For any questions regarding the city of Azusa’s EOC, please contact Jennifer Wu, (626) 812-3262, jwu@azusaca.gov

For any questions regarding AACES, ham radio volunteers, please contact AACES, (626) 812-5049, aaces@azusaca.gov