SAFENET

SAFENET Notification

  • Monthly System Maintenance that was scheduled this past Saturday did not occur. It has been rescheduled for Saturday September 20. It will begin at 7am (MDT) and last approximately four hours. During this time frame, there will be a disruption in service and applications will be unavailable. If you are not able to access the application after the completion of the maintenance, please direct your issues to the following email: BLM_HQ_590@blm.gov

SAFENET

Wildland Fire Safety & Health Reporting Network

SAFENET Event Information
Create Agency Response

SAFENET ID:
20250910-0002
Event Start Date:
09/07/2025 1100
Event Stop Date:
09/08/2025 0600 
Incident Name:
All incidents requiring radio frequencies and equipment nationally
Fire Number:
 
State:
Idaho
Jurisdiction:
Other
Local Unit:
ID-CDOC
Incident Type:
Wildland
Incident Activity:
Line
Stage of Incident:
Extended Attack
Position Title:
Communications Duty Officer 
Task:
Providing radio frequencies to incidents nationally 
Management Level:
1
Resources Involved:
Crews, Overhead, Aviation 
Contributing Factors
Contributing Factors:
Equipment, Human Factors
Human Factors:
Decision Making, Risk Assessment  
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.
CFETS (Communications Frequency & Equipment Tracking System), is the application the Communications Duty Officers (CDO) use to assign frequencies to incidents nationally. Due to a network upgrade/outage, for which we were given very little notice, access to FAMAuth was intermittent throughout the day, at best. As our application goes through FAMAuth, we were unable to access the application and provide frequency support to field except on an extremely intermittent basis. That access required users to repetitively refresh the application in hopes that FAMAuth would come up and work. If they did gain access, users had a 15-20 minute window to work on any requests that had come in before they lost connection again. For most of the day we were able to only attend to some of the requests. There were many that remained pending until the following morning when FAMAuth was fully restored.

In addition, equipment requests relying on frequencies (4312 command repeaters, primarily) require some means of shipping to incidents. The delay in being able to assign frequencies delays our technicians from programming and preparing the equipment, which greatly exacerbates delays in shipment; we are unable to set the expectation for the Great Basin Cache, who handles our shipping, on when the equipment will be ready.

During an expected outage, given enough notice, we are able to use other systems to attempt to provide frequencies to the field in a safe and timely manner. Doing so requires our application developers to glean the pertinent information from the application so that we can input them manually into other systems. Then we must carefully do what CFETS does nearly automatically to assign frequencies free from interference to or from other incidents and authorized users. The chance for human error is great. In order to get that information from the developers, we need at least a full business day.

In this case we were not informed of the short, "intermittent" outage until 1643 on Friday, 9/5. This did not provide us the time needed to prepare to use our alternative, manual systems. We were left to rely on the hope that the outage would be short and intermittent as we were told it would be.
Immediate Action Taken
Reporting Individual : please describe actions you took to correct or mitigate the unsafe/unhealthful event.
There was little that could be done during the outage. The CDOs spent most of their time repetitively refreshing their screens whenever they weren't busy working on things that did not require frequencies. In the brief windows they were able to access the CFETS application, they did what they could to fulfill requests before they lost access again.


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