| Northern Colorado Interagency Communication Center experienced radio Link Fail over Mt. Werner, Pole Mountain Flight Follow & Storm Peak Flight Follow. The Mount Werner failure apparently affected all the Medbow Routt repeaters, which is a substantial chunk of our forest. The radios came back online at 11:36, but went back down at 20:58. According to the radio tech most of the routers in the region are down. According to a different radio tech 80% of the radios in the country went down. This happened at the exact same time the Forest service did network maintenance that was supposed to be 'minimally disruptive'. We got 4 new wildfire incidents the evening of 9/7. Pole Mountain & Storm Peak are both used as national flight following channels for aircraft. We didn't have any aircraft flying at the time, but if we did, it could have been catastrophic. Radio outages have the potential to substantially impact, if not halt firefighting activities. Not having positive communications is a condition under which a firefighting resource is fully within their rights to refuse an assignment, as it is a grave safety concern. These radio outages affect everyone within our dispatch zone, which is the Northern third of Colorado. |
