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SAFENET

Wildland Fire Safety & Health Reporting Network

SAFENET Event Information

Create Agency Response

SAFENET ID:

20230911-0001        [Corrective Actions]

Event Start Date:

09/11/2023 0600

Event Stop Date:

09/11/2023 1145 

Incident Name:

STF ECC Moducom / Steptember STF Lightning

Fire Number:

 

State:

California

Jurisdiction:

USFS

Local Unit:

STCC

Incident Type:

Wildland

Incident Activity:

Support

Stage of Incident:

Initial Attack

Position Title:

Assistant Center Manager (detailed) 

Task:

Communicat via radio (Moducom) to resources responding in the field 

Management Level:

3

Resources Involved:

All field going resources on the STF 

Contributing Factors

Contributing Factors:

Communications, Equipment

Human Factors:

Decision Making, Leadership, Risk Assessment, Situational Awareness  

Other Factors:

 

Narrative

Describe in detail what happened including the concern or potential issue, the environment (weather, terrain, fire behavior, etc), and the resulting health issue.

At shift change the morning of 09/11/2023, Field resources starterd going in service to one of 30+ lightning fires on the forest. They called in service over the STF fire operations net, I tried to reply back with confirmation and time stamp. I tried several times to reach them on the radio and could not get through. The primary and back up fire repeater network on the Moducom was not working. We tried to select different tones to see if the the repeaters was the issue. once we went through all of the 13 repeaters we use on our forest we tried to restart the system to troubleshoot the issue. Restarting the system did not work. I contacted the forest Comunications tech to notify him of the problem. we then tried to use a handheld radio and vehicle mounted radio to see if the problem was the repeaters or the radio in dispatch. We came to the conclution that the issue was the Moducom system was not transmitting on the fire Operations net. all of the other chanels were working. the group of people that was at the dispatch center notified us that we were missing a fair amount of radio traffic that we had no idea about until we were back at the dispatch center. The concern and safety issue is that we cannot communicte with the field any new fires and or safety issues that could be catastrophic to life and property.

Immediate Action Taken

Reporting Individual : please describe actions you took to correct or mitigate the unsafe/unhealthful event.

We had to have one person in an AOV communicating with field resources and the other inside the center to log all of the transmitions over the fire network. we had to do this until more personeel arrived for shift. We have staggared start times and were using this method until more personeel arrived and we could travel to the back up systems that the forest has in place. Once two more personeel arrived we orgainized the things we needed and myself and one other to drive to a secondary location where we have a radio console set up for dispatching. We hsd to set up the IA desk at the hotshot base and the LE and Aircraft desks were able to stay at the dispatch center. we had to make a forest wide announcment to have all radio traffic moved to the administrative network. announcment was made via mass text and an administrative announcment over the radio system. While we were at the Hotshot base the radio communication techs were trouble shooting the possible issues. The radio techs were able to find there was a problem with the Data line (T1) and troubleshoot a fix so that we could use the radios in the dispatch center. once this fix was completed myself plus one were able to close up at the hotshot base and move back to the dispatch center.

Agency Response

20230911-0001-CA001

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