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Photo: Robert Eplett, California OES |
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Don Stabler, Senior Dispatcher for Contra Costa County Fire, was deployed with CDF's Incident Management Team 1 as the Communications Unit Leader for the Santa Clara Complex wildfires in August, 2003. Photo: Randall Larson |
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Fireground communications are always problematic on wildfires. Communications Unit leaders deploy equipment and personnel around the incident to accomodate communications between fireground units and dispatchers at the Incident Base Camp. |
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by Don Stabler, COML, CDF Command Team 2
A detailed account of managing communications during a major campaign fire. The Santa Clara Complex of August, 2003, not only challenges communications unit leaders due to difficult terrain and multiple fires over a 31,000 acre region of northern California, but was also the cause of the largest fire shelter deployment in California wildfire history. Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 26, 2003, a series of lightning strikes sparked a number of major wildfires in the hills between Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Alameda, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus counties – burning a swath of 31,000 acres from the south/east region of the San Francisco Bay Area to the foothills of California's central valley. These fires, most of which were fortunately in remote areas well away from homes, would challenge local and state firefighters, test field communications managers, and result in the largest deployment of fire shelters in California wildfire history.
As the Communications Unit Leader (COML) for CDF Incident Management Team 2, which was on response standby for that week, I watched reports of the lightning strikes carefully, anticipating what they would do to the dry grasses on the hillsides.
By 8:00 AM I reported for duty as the shift supervisor for the Contra Costa County Communications Center. Within two hours we received a report of smoke on North East side of Mount Diablo, the largest mountain on the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. Since "the Mountain" had not sustained a major fire since 1977, I thought that this could turn into something major. With the response, though, of a small army of firefighters from Contra Costa County Fire, East Contra Costa County Fire, San Ramon Valley Fire, East Bay Regional Parks, and the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection (CDF), including a CDF Air Tactical Unit (a small, fixed wing aircraft that is used to coordinate the deployment of firefighter helicopters and air tankers during a wildfire), crews were able to find their way into a remote and fairly inaccessible area and keep the fire to a few acres. The outcome on this sure could have been much different. As units were containing the fire, the CDF Air Tactical Unit advised he was leaving to check reports of smoke in the hills of Livermore in adjacent Alameda County.
As the morning went on, we monitored the local CDF radio channel and heard more and more smokes and fires being reported. By early afternoon, I was notified that my CDF Command Team was being activated. I advised my Comm Center Chief, Brent Finster, who had anticipated my sudden departure, and I prepared to head for the city of Morgan Hill in south Santa Clara County, where a command post was being set up to manage what was quickly becoming a complex (a series of related fires managed under a single command organization). Our team would be supporting the local first responders (most of which where CDF or county resources).
A short time later, though, as I was arranging for shift coverage, Morgan Hill CDF called to say that our assignment had been changed, and we were to report to the Camp Parks Regional Army Reserve Training Facility in Dublin. This brought a smile to my face for a couple of reasons: one; Camp Parks is where we have done live fire training exercises for the last ten years, and for the first time in my six years on Team 2, the fire was close by! This time, I would not be the last person on the Team to arrive!
We reported at 8:00 PM to the Alameda County EOC, located at the Santa Rita Jail complex adjacent to Camp Parks. We were informed that we being were given a "box of fires" that was about 40 miles by 60 miles, and believed to contain about 20 separate fires. This box included parts of Alameda, Santa Clara, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin Counties. Ultimately, eight of these fires became significant incidents. As incident command transition took place and we made our plans and put in our orders, I was pleased to see CDF Fire Captain Paul Jones enter the room. Paul is assigned to CDF's Amador-El Dorado Unit, east of Sacramento, and when I see him it usually means Com-45 – one of CDF's powerful mobile communication centers, is parked outside. That meant we had an excellent, and familiar, vehicle to serve as our Comm Unit for the next __ days.
In cooperation with the Logistics Chief on our Team, I started getting our communications plan in order. An order for Incident Dispatchers (INDIs) had already been placed into the mutual aid system when we were activated; I requested four more plus a Communications Technician (COMT) to support our operations. By morning, though, I hadn't received word about who would be filling those requests or when. Aware of the immediate need to staff our comm unit to handle this significant array of wildfires, I took the bull by the horns and "obtained" two dispatchers who I knew were qualified and were also close by. CDF normally frowns on "named requests" when asking for mutual aid overhead personnel, but there are times when the system will make it work. This was one of those times, and I worked with our incident ordering manager to get them deployed in a timely manner. The first was Kelley Dwyer, from my own agency. She, eventually, as additional personnel arrived, became the Incident Communications Manager (INCM) at the Camp Parks Base. The second dispatcher came from the Hayward Fire Department and like Kelley, Ester Jobrack lived close by. Having people with lay of land knowledge in the Comm Unit has paid off time after time. Later that day, my next two Incident Dispatchers arrived. The first was Laura Lewis, a CDF Engineer from Humbolt County in cool, coastal Northern California. The second was firefighter II Melissa Leader from Riverside County, from deep, sweltering southern California. (Between the two of them, we could never get the temperature in the Comm Unit right!) Within the next day and a half, we picked up 4 more people and had adequate staffing for the north part of the incident. A separate CDF Team was handling the south part of the incident from the Morgan Hill base.
Communications Issues
Almost immediately, I had spoken at length with Mike Stonum, the ECC Chief at CDF's Morgan Hill Command Center (which is the local dispatch/command facility for all or part of the five counties involved in the Complex. We discussed frequencies, repeater sites, and available resources needed to accommodate the firefighters on this end of the fires. One of the problems we encountered initially was due to simple miscommunication. When Mike BC Stonum and I discussed frequencies and he told me which ones we should use, we each assumed the other had actually placed the order to use them (in California, fire radio frequencies are ordered through the mutual aid system, like strike teams or incident dispatchers). This blunder, which I'll accept the blame for, came to light on Day 4, when we started getting complaints from the Butte County CDF unit and CDF's North Ops Command Center in Redding about being on the wrong channels.
Early on it had been determined that a "spike camp," or smaller, satellite command post, would be established at Morgan Hill's Christmas Tree Park to support resources assigned to the south end of the fire. Morgan Hill CDF has a small but capable Comm Unit (Com-1629) and it was deployed at this location, staffed with some local CDF personnel and volunteers, all of whom did a great job managing communications for the fires on the South end of the complex. I had ordered an INCM to be deployed there, but instead received another Comm Unit Leader, Rick Pound from the CDF Tehama-Glenn unit. I directed Rick to Christmas Tree Park and acted as my Deputy at the fire's south end, running the comm unit there and saving me many phone calls and trips to between the CP and the spike camp, which were a good hour apart.
Another issue was frequency coverage. We never were able to establish adequate communications with the spike camp via radio. I believe it was possible, we just lacked getting the right equipment installed in the right place. Having worked for the Alameda County Sheriff's Department in the late 1970's as a dispatch supervisor, I knew that even then there were coverage issues in the Livermore hills area. I called a radio technician I knew from Alameda County named Gene Alga, and asked if this problem had improved at all in the intervening years. He advised me that since they had gone to a trunking system, the problem had only gotten worse. For the first four days, we added, relocated, and changed out repeaters. While this would improve coverage in some areas, it would always cause coverage to be lost in others. There were a couple of mountaintops that would have worked great but we couldn't use them since fires were threatening them. I found it eerie that a person talking on a handheld radio in Livermore could be heard in Butte County (almost 200 miles north), but couldn't talk to someone over the next hilltop. Cell phones were also sporadic. We issued cell phones from a state OES mutual aid cache, and we had a few places where people could use their cell phone, but they could not use their radio. Eventually, we procured a portable repeater from our own County WMD cache and placed it on top of Mount Diablo, supplementing the others we had, and that finally solved our communications problems.
The Annie Fire
Of all the fires in the complex, the "Annie Fire" would be most problematic, consuming almost one third of the total acreage of the complex. As the fire burned east toward Interstate 5 in Stanislaus County, the communications issues on the south end became pretty overwhelming. I decided to have CDF's Com-1629 move east and become a mobile relay to enhance communications for the Annie Fire. To replace that unit at Christmas Hill Park, I ordered up a third comm unit, the venerable OES Comm Support 5262 out of Redwood City, which at my direction came with an Incident Dispatcher from San Mateo County Communications, Don Cherry. OES Assistant Chief Marvin Howard "greased the system" and within 90 minutes the unit arrived at Christmas Tree Park. A subsequent order was placed and two more local CDF personnel arrived to cover the positions vacated by the personnel who had taken Com-1629 east.
Burn-Over
Since communications coverage was not great, and with the number of fires and number of personnel assigned to the incident (over 2500), I was very concerned about the potential for a real bad "event" taking place. My worries were well grounded. Around 4 AM on Friday morning, August 29th, I was awakened in my hotel room by a call from one of our safety officers, advising that a burn-over had occurred and that 55 fire personnel had deployed their shelters to survive the flames. By the time I found my heart and placed it back in my chest and arrived at the Incident Comm Unit, it was determined that we had only two minor injuries. And it was in an area of decent radio coverage. I could start breathing again.
Nine days after I arrived, the fire was contained and controlled and the Command teams were being released. For me, it was very strange to be sitting outside the Comm Unit on demob day, realizing that this unit was parked within a mile of where my fire service career started, back in April of 1970. I had, indeed, come full circle.
Lessons Learned
If I had to do it again, I would have probably ordered up another Comm Tech or two with instructions to "tie in the incident and make it work." While I had good Comm Tech's assigned to the incident, none had worked a complex fire before. I should have found a Comm Tech that had done a few of these and who would be familiar with what would, and what would not, work effectively during this type of incident.
Some of the frustrations I felt were with the ordering of personnel for the comm unit. I do understand that, when you are ordering a large amount of engine, dozer, and hand crew strike teams, a request for Incident Dispatchers is probably of high priority to only the COML. But no one could really explain to me why the first two requests were filled with CDF personnel were from the far ends of the State, while requests days later were filled by local personnel. That has been an ongoing and frustrating problem within the mutual aid system for some time. However I do want to emphasize that all 20-some personnel assigned to Comm Units of this complex did an outstanding job under very difficult and problematic circumstances. Since these fires were all within the State Responsibility Area, and this the major fire in the State at the time, we had units and personnel from each of CDF's 21 operational units. Four local government strike teams were eventually ordered, however, to provide for structure protection later in the incident, and Safety Officers were ordered from local departments whose knowledge of the area were very valuable.
Don Stabler is a Senior Fire Dispatcher with the Contra Costa County Fire Department in Pleasant Hill, California. He will have completed his 34th year of public safety dispatching on April 21 of 2004. Don has served on various committees, state and local, and has assisted at OES Fire and Rescue Headquarters in the past doing resource coordination during major fires and floods. Don has served on the California Fire Chief's Association, Northern Division, Communications Section for over 10 years and is the lead instructor in their "Incident Dispatcher" Program |
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