After five years as the coordinator of the West Marin Disaster Council, Anne Sands will retire from the position in December to “take a deep breath, ride my horse in the park and play pickleball with my lady friends.”
Ms. Sands, a resident of Dogtown, has a long history of service in West Marin: she volunteered as a firefighter and EMT, and was president of the board of directors of the Bolinas Fire Protection District. During her time as coordinator of the disaster council, she was the point person for over 30 different agencies dealing in disaster-relief efforts. “I thought she’d do a great job, and she did,” Bolinas fire chief Anita Tyrrell-Brown said.
The disaster council is a coalition of nine fire departments, nine community disaster councils, four park agencies, and 12 other agencies, including the Red Cross, Supervisor Dennis Rodoni’s office, North Marin Water District, the United States Coast Guard and KMWR.
The council meets quarterly, and Ms. Sands was in charge of running the sessions, wherein members update one another on their activities of the previous quarter. Organizing and holding the course of the meetings is no easy task, Chief Tyrrell-Brown said, but Ms. Sands was up to the challenge. “She’s very good at wrangling a lot of people,” she said.
Ms. Sands ran her own environmental consulting service for 25 years before moving to West Marin. She arrived in Dogtown with her husband, the late Russell Faure-Brac, in 1992, and the next year she offered her skills in search and rescue to Bolinas’s then-fire chief, Kevin Hicks.
Ms. Sands had experience monitoring trails on horseback in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, riding around to aid lost or injured hikers. Chief Hicks told her she could participate in search and rescue as a volunteer firefighter, and thus Ms. Sands was snookered into the volunteer squad.
After finding that medical calls were what interested her most, Ms. Sands became an EMT. She served as a firefighter in Bolinas for five years, until 1998, when she ran for a seat on the fire board. She held a seat until 2006.
Her proudest accomplishment during that time, she told the Light, was the construction of a new fire station and health clinic built through a partnership with the Coastal Health Alliance.
Ms. Sands took a short break after retiring from the fire board, but service sought her out again when Chief Tyrrell-Brown told her they were looking for someone to take over as the West Marin Disaster Council coordinator after the departure of previous coordinator, Libby Coleman.
Due to West Marin’s size and scope, it was crucial to have a point person who was plugged into agencies across the county. “Anne became that point for people,” Chief Tyrrell-Brown said. “And if she wasn’t able to answer or act upon an issue, she knew if the Office of Emergency Services or Marin County Fire or another fire department [could]. She did bring in some of these smaller, a little more isolated disaster councils into the fold and really brought everybody together.”
Part of Ms. Sands’s time was spent organizing Community Emergency Response Team classes: making sure instructors were lined up, that classroom projectors were working and that all of the boxes of donated Bovine Bakery pastries were present and accounted for.
But the most crucial aspect of the role was managing intercommunication between the member agencies. “The facilitation is the most important part of the job,” Ms. Sands said. “There’s no need to create yet another level of organization, but the agencies really do need to be talking to each other. This was an opportunity for everybody to find out what’s going on with other agencies.”
Ted Melden, the operations manager of the Dillon Beach Emergency Response Team, said Ms. Sands has been “a wonderful facilitator” for West Marin. “Any time DBERT has needed anything, Anne has been there for us,” he said.
Before she assumed the coordinator role, Ms. Sands said, “there were a lot of disaster councils just doing their thing by themselves, and there wasn’t this sharing of information and opportunities to learn from each other. I didn’t do the work—I just encouraged everybody. I was the cheerleader.”
But the time has come to hang up her metaphorical pom-poms. “I’m a Gemini, and I have a short attention span, and I like to move on and do different things,” she said. “I just felt like it was time to let someone else have all the fun.”
Ms. Sands plans to travel, visit friends, and continue on as president of the West Marin Rotary Club. She has her hands full caring for the horses, sheep and tenants at her ranch in Dogtown. “It’s not like I’m going to be twiddling my thumbs,” she pointed out. “I’ve been a caretaker all my life,” she said. “A schoolteacher, firefighter, EMT, taking care of my husband when he was ill. It’s time to take care of myself.”