And I didn’t know this until early on, but there’s a DOI system in each one of them and there’s a Forest Service system in each one of them. And they don’t talk to each other. And it’s like, are you kidding me? How long has this gone?
Oh, this has gone on for decades. And, you know, we’re still working off a copper wire in some of this stuff. I mean, we are decades behind when it comes to IT infrastructure, what your local fire department would have. I mean, if the local fire department in San Diego or Boise or Orange County, you name the place,if they had the same systems that the feds are operating under, people would be outraged. It’s not uncommon for systems to fail. What do we do as firefighters? Oh, we figure out how to work around. Right? And pretty soon we do that enough and that just becomes our norm.
Do we want to invest in two systems or do we want to invest in one system?
Well, my thought would be that (bear with me, now, I know this is really out there) that two departments could use the same system! Not that I’m arguing either way, but just because it’s always been done that way, doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Imagine the two Secretaries sitting down with their heads of IT. “Look,” they say “this is ridiculous; you get your heads together and figure something out that works. If there’s a reason you can’t, bring it to us immediately. You have until next fire season.”
The Hotshot Wakeup also went through some of the comms related issues that happened this year. From the transcript of that podcast.:
In my previous episode with the Director of the United States Wildland Fire Service, Brian Fennessy, one of our conversations that we had was about the dispatch system across the United States. And I had a couple people reach out and say, hey, what does that mean though? What’s going on with that? You guys say it’s aged and decrepit.
How does that affect operations? I’ve covered it a few times on the show, going through some reports that have kind of displayed some examples of what exactly that means. And so just quickly, I pulled up, what do we have? One, two, three, four, five different reports. Safety reports that were issued in the last month.So this is all within the last 30 days from dispatches around the nation talking about the issues that they’re having and just kind of paints a better picture. Of what the dispatch centers are dealing with. And some of these I’ve talked about before, but I’ll give a more concise, clear picture of what they’re dealing with here.The first one and the most recent comes out of California. And I believe it’s where we at. Yeah, the San Bernardino operating area. And they’re discussing the… Dispatch Center there. It says, on August 26, I was working at the fire lab in Riverside, California. I received notification that the Forest Service Supervisor’s Officein San Bernardino was operating on generator power since October of 2025. And I’ve discussed this incident before. They’ve been off-grid. It says they then had experienced a catastrophic generator failure and they were running on generator power at this center. It says as a result, both the Forest Service andthe United States Wildland Fire Service dispatch centers activated their continuity of operations plan, relying on a much smaller generator to maintain essential radio communications. So major dispatch center and operating center. Relying on a pull start generator, it seems like, because their main generator looks like failed. It says since they switched to that smaller generator, they’ve seen minor failures and intermittent outages across multiple radio channels. Persistent concerns about reliability of the planned generator, with the possibility of its failure looming, ongoing operational risks for dispatch centers which depend on uninterrupted radio communications to coordinate fire and law enforcement personnel. It goes on to say this issue has persisted for over a year.We’re seeing minimal progress. And they say, hey, there’s personnel safety issues, saying the reliability of radio communications is critical for the safety of fire and law enforcement personnel. A catastrophic generator failure could force the dispatch center to shut down. Operational continuity. Warning that if the other generator goes out, they will have a complete and total communication blackout.And then talks about leadership response and saying, hey, this has been going on for a year. What the hell’s going on to try to fix this thing? It says the ongoing generator. Generator and radio equipment failures represent a serious hazard to personnel and operations, saying that a Bureau of Land Management generator is currently running to keep essential radios and functions for dispatch to remain operational. So that’s one example to kind of give you a heads up. That was in California.The next one out of Wyoming, it says on August 21st, the Cody Interagency Dispatch Center phones and radios became non-functional afterthe staff in the dispatch center worked quickly to get their computers connected to some sort of Wi-Fi to connect to the WildCAD functionality system. At 10 o’clock, a text message was sent via that system to the Cody resources to inform them the phones and radios were down and cell phone numbers were provided to reach expanded dispatch.And the main dispatch center. Multiple radio checks were tested and the only successful one were on the BLM Copper Mountain repeaters in the Wyoming Link repeater. A Forest Service radio ticket was submitted to see if the issue could be fixed quickly and or remotely. As well as a Department of Interior phone ticket for the main dispatch lines.We also tried radio tests from the Casper Dispatch Center on the Continuity of Operations computer and were unable to reach field resources with that. The problem is still ongoing. We’ve had multiple smoke checks with a few requesting aircraft and no way of reaching resources. So that one’s Wyoming. As you can see, it’s kind of widespread.I already talked about this one. This was up in Montana, saying that Missoula Dispatch Center lost all functionality for incoming phone calls on center landlines. This issue is promptly reported as a critical need through the proper channels, but it has been more than 24 hours. Our lines are still not working.This report I talked about maybe three weeks ago. So I assume this problem has been fixed, but I bring it up again to talk about Some of the questions you had of, hey, what do you mean by our dispatch centers are not working properly?It goes on to say they were managing multiple incidents when the system failure happened. The next one, Sequoia National Forest out in California, the report, again, I’ve touched on this one, but just to give you an idea, it says, during normal forest operations over the past several weeks, the Sequoia National Forest has experienced a significant decline in radio communication reliability. Although radio technicians have informed us that efforts are ongoing to resolve the communication issues with the Central California Interagency Communication Center, radio performance has not improved to a level that allows Forest Service field personnel to consistently communicate with dispatch. Another one out of Wyoming, this one out of the Casper jurisdiction, it says.
So I wanted to quickly bring that up because there were a couple questions of like, hey, How bad is it? And just off those five little examples there, the people who run these facilities and these dispatch centers say it’s a major, major problem.
For a long time, the technology was not there to fix these things. And yet I doubt our military has the same kinds of comms issues (maybe they do) even working in foreign countries. Yes, I get it, fire folks are absolutely brilliant at work-arounds. Yet something seems to be broken in the “identifying and fixing problems” systems, and it’s not the identifying part.
This seems to me like a great topic for a reporter to look into more deeply. And maybe one of our wildland firefighter organizations could get the ball rolling with a press release? “No more” says X, president of Firefighters For Improvement of Working Conditions “this season has shown the dangers to our firefighters. In this country, leaders in technologies, we believer that there is no reason and we can do better. We call on the Trump Administration and the federal wildfire agencies to strike now, before next fire season, to fix this so every firefighter has communication access in to a reliable dispatch system with 21st century technology. Wildland firefighters put their lives on the line and deserve the best that this country can provide!”
I need clarity on what systems DOI and FS have that don’t talk to each other. I’m not sure what the excerpt is getting at. We can talk on NPS repeaters and FS repeaters. There’s an example cited above where a dispatch went down and both BLM and FS were impacted so again, not sure what system. Perhaps something local to that area.
And yeah, radios have dead spots with poor reception. It would be nice to remedy that. But I think we also need to keep in mind the geographic scale that needs coverage for wildfire response. A forest can be well over a couple million acres, not counting all the other surrounding jurisdictions. Often encompassing multiple counties or municipalities so I’m not surprised a town or county has better comms. Add in topography.
I don’t know either, just reporting what the Chief said… I don’t have a dog in this fight but many wildfire folks think that some things aren’t working as well as they could. Perhaps if the FS and Int put out a comms related list of things that went wrong this season, coupled with a list of things they are going to try to fix specifically and where… and folks could check that these things have been done by next season. But maybe that happens every year?
Okay, got it. And yeah, to reiterate from my perspective, lots of room for improvement.
Chief Schultz attended a forest meeting last year? And took questions. One question was about poor internet speeds in the office and resulting decrease in production. The chief was seemingly surprised to learn there was no IT support locally and we rely on the CIO. Ongoing issues with phone and internet outages.
I’d say there’s overarching telecom issues. We’re currently getting by on mobile starlinks this past summer ( to the chief’s point on work arounds).