At around 930 in the morning the radios stopped working. We had many people out in the field and no way to communicate with them. We then decided we needed to start our COOP plan. North zone was completely down and South and East zones where going in and out. We let the duty officers know that they needed to announce the radios in dispatch where down. We let our neighbors know that we had not aviation frequencies. Once we got to North Umpqua Ranger district the COOP radios were not working when trying to talk to South. We could use the base radio in the fire office and the COOP radio for North and East. The North zone did show a link fail the whole time the radios where down but continued to work at the COOP location. We did find out that the frequency was programed wrong in the veg file for south zone so once that got fixed we did have radios for the whole forest at North Umpqua. It was then found out that Lumen had a fiber cut and we were waiting for them to find it and repair it. Around 1700 the issue got fixed and the radios in Roseburg Dispatch started to work.
Some concerns was that this happened why were in red flag warning for lightning, heat and high winds. We also had many resources out in the field and an active fire with at least 85 people on it and actively working the fire. We also had lightning strikes and were unable to fly aviation due to not having national, air guard or an aircraft dispatcher at the COOP console. |
