The Yellow Dog fire was emerging. It was estimated initially at 45 acres and grew to 144 acres in a wilderness area impacting private and state land, and with smoke impacting a mine fresh-air intake. Fire leadership ordered a T3 Standard Helicopter in addition to other ground resources.
The local VHF repeater, the only one that works in this area, was not working with multiple radio checks, and dispatch was communicating with the on-scene resources with the state's 800mhz radio system. Forest Service CWN aircraft are not required to have 800 mhz radios so we knew that we would need to communicate with any incoming aircraft on a VHF repeater, so we consulted with the local radio tech.
The radio tech told us that it was a known issue that the McCormick repeater was broken, and that it had to do with the antenna on the repeater, and that the tower had been deemed unsafe to climb so it was unfixable, which had been discovered earlier in the year with another fire in the same area. |
