Thank you for your short summary article in Wednesday”s Record-Bee (“Fire meeting held at Moose Lodge” by Denise Rockenstein) regarding the town hall meeting covering the Wye fire. There were many comments made during that meeting and the one you chose to highlight was that I said “government doesn”t provide cell service,” in response to a citizens concern about problematic communications during the emergency.
The reporter and others may not have caught my follow-on comment and I did not get the chance to elaborate that I believe government does have a role in encouraging better cell coverage and will work to do so for Spring Valley (just as I am working for better broadband coverer age county-wide). That said, I am pretty sure that cell coverage would have been problematic or perhaps even unavailable during this fire. My experience during an emergency in the past where mobile coverage was theoretically available, was that the mobile phone technology is easily swamped in an emergency and the towers, depending upon their positions, can be overcome by fire, just as the landlines were.
That is why it helps to know who the HAM radio operators are and to have a plan within the community in case communications get cut off.
If I could deliver just one message it would be this: Despite all the fire preparation thus far, this is a wake-up call for Spring Valley (and other communities in Lake County for that matter). This could have been the worst case scenario — with the road access cut off by fire and fire closing in on the community.
This time, through a combination of good fortune and the hard work of the fire fighters, a community-wide disaster was averted.
Each community must work together to create a plan for communication and evacuation with the expectation that in the first hours of a fire, they may be cut-off from communications and help.
Many thanks to the men and women who fought this fire, who helped their neighbors during the crisis, and my heart goes out to the victims of this fire — those who lost their homes or property.
Denise Rushing
District 3 Supervisor
