On the morning of 6/21 the Incident management team was in process of transferring command to the local district T3 incident management Team. The Signal Peak base station stopped working resulting in the loss of a the main communication hub for this fire for both Ground and Aviation fire fighting personnel. Loss of national flight following.
Being the main hub of communications on the Tadpole fire, Signal Peak is also the only base station to access Jacks Peak and Emory Pass repeaters. There is not other access route (redundancy) built into the GNF radio communication plan for these repeaters other than a mobile radio house in the center. This is a known long standing problem.
This problem requires immediate attention by the local forest CIO com techs and an effort had finally been successfully made by contacting the NM CIO supervisor. One hours after awareness of this problem, one radio tech was e/r from his home, one hour away, from the GNF Supervisors office.
Ticket process for this incident took just under 45 minutes to accomplish. The first line CIO employee entering the ticket did not know radio terminology for this problem. The employee had to dictate what I was saying word for word to be put into the ticket......followed by his computer failing on him and losing everything he had entered.
One hour and 17 minutes after this problem arose, communications with the tadpole fire has yet to be established and transition to the forest frequencies has been on hold. |
