Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin was in Washington D.C., today, giving a presentation before the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management. The subject: the October wildfires and how they impacted Gorin and her District 1 constituents. Gorin lost her Oakmont home to the fires and offered a poignant detail to the committee about seeing an “ironing board sticking out of the ashes” where her home once stood. She was invited to speak by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, the North Coast congressmen who represents parts of Sonoma County. Gorin and her husband lost everything to the fire that consumed their home and thousands of others.
“And you magnify my experience and my husband’s, by 5,000 or more, and you get some scale of the needs of my community and more,” she said, highlighting a critical county need to upgrade its early-warning system and the need for better disaster preparedness overall. “We need to prepare our community for the unfolding disasters in the future,” she said.
