The ARP Supervisor's /Canyon Lakes Ranger District office building was scheduled for a network upgrade. Fort Collins Dispatch made the decision to move operations to our COOP location since network connectivity would be intermittent throughout the day which affects radio and phone communications. I split my dispatchers up to have 3 stay behind at the ARP SO building and 3 of us went to the COOP site to set up. I was told they would be taking the network down at 11 AM MST. I was called at about 0930 saying they were going to take the network down. I told them we were not ready as we were still having difficulty at our COOP facility. I told them we would call when we had positive radio comms.
At some point, the network group went ahead with the upgrade which took all of our radios and phones off the network rendering our dispatch center inoperable. We were under a red flag warning for most of our dispatch zone and as soon as my dispatchers at the ARP SO building told me everything was off line there, I called the network liaison contact to let them know they needed to put us back on the network because we still didn't have COOP operations functioning. The contact said he'd talk with the network person and let them know about the issue. In the meantime, we had a fast moving grass fire start in our zone and we still did not have connectivity back to the network so were unable to talk to any responding fire resources. I called the liaison back and told him we had a wildfire and the network needed to be put back online immediately and all other work stopped because of the emerging wildfire. The network person tried to fix the issue they encountered but were unable to and continued to move forward with switching out the network switches throughout the building. We had a second wildfire start and they requested aircraft, but again we were unable to communicate with the responding resources. |
