Director of CA State's Office of Emergency Services to Retire

He’s been the face of disaster in California for the past decade, standing alongside the governor or some other elected official while directing the state’s crisis response.

Mark Ghilarducci is retiring at year’s end as director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, the state announced Friday, capping a tumultuous 10 years that saw an unprecedented rise in wildfires and assorted other disasters.

Ghilarducci worked with other officials to respond to such incidents as the 2017 spillway crisis at Oroville Dam and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, the deadliest wildfire in California history. Cal OES has also been involved in the state’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For more than a decade, Mark has expertly guided our state through some of the most complex and challenging disaster conditions in the nation — coordinating California’s emergency response to unprecedented wildfires, severe drought, earthquakes and cybersecurity threats, as well as our nation-leading efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement announcing Ghilarducci’s retirement.

Ghilarducci, a UC Davis graduate, has worked in disaster response for more than 30 years. including a stint at the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Bill Clinton’s presidency. He was dispatched from California to direct search-and-rescue teams at the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 and advised Louisiana officials after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“It was surreal,” Ghilarducci said in a 2016 Cal OES podcast about Oklahoma City. “All of us were in just complete awe of the destruction.”

A former deputy state fire chief, Ghilarducci has spent much of his time in recent years working with Cal Fire and other agencies on the series of major wildfires that have hit California.

Besides helping with immediate response, his agency has also worked on efforts to tame the homeowners’ insurance crisis that has plagued rural areas in wildfire zones. Earlier this year, for instance, he announced the state was releasing hundreds of millions of dollars to help residents with “community hardening” projects designed to reduce fire risks and coax insurance companies back into the market.

At the same time, Cal OES has come in for some criticism for its response to California’s wildfires. In 2019 the state auditor said Cal OES had done a poor job of preparing local officials for evacuations and other wildfire preparations.

“Cal OES has failed to provide important resources to help local jurisdictions in planning, even when state law has required it to do so,” the report said.

“For example, Cal OES has not complied with state law requiring it to provide guidance to local jurisdictions related to strategies for identifying people with access and functional needs and for evacuating people with disabilities. As a result, local jurisdictions — like those that we reviewed — may struggle to adequately plan for how to best assist those people.”

The audit also said OES wasn’t completing required “after-action reports,” which are supposed to share lessons learned with county and local officials. In a written response to the auditor, Ghilarducci said his department has struggled to keep up with a staggering workload. Ghilarducci added that even though the reports haven’t always been completed, the state has conducted multiple “debriefs” and “feedback loops” to help county emergency officials learn how to deal with disasters.

Cal OES and other agencies also were criticized over the state’s purchasing practices in the early months of the pandemic, when officials were scrambling to buy ventilators and other medical equipment. In some cases, the state was signing contracts with suppliers with questionable track records, as reported by The Sacramento Bee and others.

“Not one dime — not one dime — of taxpayer dollars has been lost,” Ghilarducci told lawmakers at a contentious legislative hearing on the state’s procurement effort.

He said officials had to deal with “fraud, promises not kept, overstated capabilities, and an overwhelming number of individuals and companies working hard to take advantage of the situation. It was really a miracle in many ways that there weren’t more challenges.”

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