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Morning Line Up – July 01

9 comments

The Derecho Aftermath – Day 2

Bill "Firegeezer" Schumm checked in last evening. No significant storm damage to his home.

Firegeezer International Headquarters remains powerless. He charged the cell phone in his car.

Unsuccessful in finding a hotel in the greater Stafford area. Did score Chinese food for dinner. 

So how bad will today be?

This message was sent out to Fairfax County, Virginia, firefighters yesterday afternoon:

From a labor representative:

After talking to personnel that are working in the stations and DPSC today, I am getting intel that many grocery stores and gas stations in Fairfax County are closed and there are widespread power outages.

With that, personnel should gas up their POVs where they can and do not plan on being able to go food or medicine shopping while at work. As it says below, show up for work prepared.

Not a sermon – just a thought.

From Fire Operations

Good afternoon,

All employees scheduled to report to work on Sunday, July 1st are strongly encouraged to consider reporting to work with sufficient quantities of food and water to sustain them for 24-36 hours.

Fairfax County and surrounding jurisdictions were significantly affected by strong thunderstorms on Friday evening. Power outages continue, closed businesses have been observed as well as long lines at open businesses.

Consideration should also be given to reporting with sufficient clothing in light of the heat and the potential that station washers and dryers may not operate due to the power outages.

One reason yesterday's Morning Line Up was posted around noon:

The Fairfax County Emergency Operations Center has been activated. There is a regionwide outage of telecommunications that includes 9-1-1 service, cell phone service, landline service and the ability to text. In the event of an emergency, residents are directed to go to a local fire or police station to report the emergency.

Never remember a situation when the 9-1-1 phones were down.

Firegeezer and FossilMedic will resume regular posting as soon as the local power companies repair the "catastrophic" damage to their infrastructure.

Oh, great. Now I gotta boil water … (HERE)

Oh wait, I have a Bunn-O-Matic

The crews have been slammed. Please do a detailed inspection of the apparatus and equipment this morning.

Make sure we have extra water on board.

I will start the coffee. We will reassemble at 0800 to review the department's Incident Action Plan for the next 12 hours.

Mike "FossilMedic" Ward for Bill "Firegeezer" Schumm

Also on FireGeezer…

Posted by on July 1, 2012 • Filed under: morning lineup, News, Technology & Communications • Tagged: , ,
  • Jpsastro

     A great resource when communications are critical and lacking is the Amateur Radio community through out the nation. The amateurs, HAMS, have provided emergency communications during many situations. It would behoove any one involved in Public Safety concerns to create a relationship with the local Amateur radio clubs in there community. I know just how valuable these people can be. When all else fails, Ham radio is there.
     

  • http://www.nottrainedbutwetryhard.blogspot.com FireCap5

    I bet the good old FA boxes would work! Missing the Gamewell now?

  • Dalmatian90

    Honest question…how did the telegraph wires hold up against trees?

    We all know how tensile power lines are; it’s unusual but not unheard of for cable TV lines to break; and phone lines are pretty resistent due to the hundreds of small wires bundled within them.While I understand the telegraphs were built in a loop to resist a single break in the line, outside of downtowns and cities that had the circuits buried underground…how well do they perform when there is massive infrastructure damage to above ground utilities?

  • Dalmatian90

    >
    station washers and dryers may not operate due to the power outages.

    One day I will understand why fire stations aren’t built with generators sufficient to power the building at 100% operations.  And in areas with natural gas lines, dual fueled to run indefinitely on natural gas or switch to a propane backup tank if the gas grid goes down.

    >
    residents are directed to go to a local fire or police station to report the emergency.

    Because of that.  Fire Stations are great for handling immediate neighborhood organizational needs (as well as supporting firefighters and if necessary their families)(and cops if they ask pretty please :) ).  Keep them lit, HVAC running to keep the station comfortably warm or cool as necessary, keep the kitchen working, the toilets flushing, and the decon equipment going – not that clothes would ever become contaminated, multiple times, during the duration of a major natural disaster.  

    Oh well, one day someone will come up with a solid justification.  One day pigs will also fly.

  • Dalmatian90

    >Never remember a situation when the 9-1-1 phones were down. It would be interesting to see the "after action" on what went wrong; Connecticut has a pretty resilient system but even with the redundancy we occasionally have a particular answering point lose 911 service; but as far as I know we've never had a situation that failover to another answering point failed.

    HOWEVER…my experience in the hurricane last August, the first up here in "the modern era" is this:– Cable based telephones fail immediately; cable systems aren't built with resilience.– Sprint, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile failed within 8 hours.– AT&T Landline downstream of "Neighborhood Concentrators" failed in 12 to 24 hours.  

    If DSL is available to you, and you live more then three miles by wire from a Central Office you're going through a concentrator.  You might be going through a concentrator even if you live closer; these are were copper wires from your house terminate and signals are put onto the fiberoptic network (which is pretty rugged).  

    If you're lucky enough to serviced direct from a CO they have massive battery banks (telephones — and all the computers in the COs — run on 48 volts DC) and generators to charge the batteries…so you're unlikely to lose service.– Verizon Wireless stayed up the entire time, even though some of their towers wouldn't have had power restored for a week.  They must have generators or fuel cells at their sites; whichever BIG kudos to them.  

    Cell sites tie into the telephone network via fiberoptic; fiber just needs power on both ends and an intact cable to work.  Fiber doesn't break often; it's very expensive to repair so the phone company builds to resist falling trees and car accidents (which is helped by be located low on the pole, and protected by proximity to the very strong copper telephone cables).

    Which adds up to:  Even if 911 was working, 24 hours into an incident there's a good chance most people would be scrambling to find a phone with service.  And that's a shame, since as Verizon Wireless showed — it IS possible to be highly profitable, have a modern network to provide high quality of service, AND still resilient.

  • Dalmatian90

    Sorry about that, don’t know why my last post was a format fail!  It was multiple paragraphs when I typed it :)

  • http://www.firegeezer.com/ Mike “FossilMedic” Ward

     Hi Dal,

    At the 1989 San Francisco earthquake the Fire Alarm telegraph system continued to operate, but that was a below grade event.

  • http://www.firegeezer.com/ Mike “FossilMedic” Ward

     I will blame Derencho. I have uncharacteristically had multiple disconnections on Verizon Wireless today.

  • http://www.firegeezer.com/ Mike “FossilMedic” Ward

     It is a “feature” within the system.  Just tried to add paragraph breaks in your post … fail #2.

    By the way, GREAT response.

    Mike