Trial by fire
‘I was up on the hill watching the troops go in,” says Cunningham, Colo., Fire Chief Jerry Rhodes, “and thinking it was the most intense fire I'd seen in my 28 years in the fire service. I stood on a ridge top 10 miles away and literally watched the fire move forward, it was so massive.”
Rhodes is recalling the Hayman Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado's history, which raged through the northern part of the state in the summer of 2002 with a ferocity not seen before. Flames flaring up to 600-feet high took whole mountainsides at a time. During its three-week rampage, the fire destroyed 137,000 acres and 133 homes in four counties. Working to strike it: 2,564 firefighters, 26 public safety agencies and, fortunately, a new 800MHZ digital trunked statewide communications system that helped agencies coordinate and maximize their efforts.
“This new system and the interoperability it made possible proved particularly valuable during this catastrophic fire, because it enabled numerous agencies spanning multiple counties to communicate clearly, effectively and efficiently with each other,” says Lt. Mike Coleman, Douglas County communications director. “It gave us new ways to communicate, which made the difference in suppressing the fire as quickly as possible and saving lives and preventing injuries.”
One of the keys to the Motorola Astro Smart Zone system's interoperability is that it's compliant with the Project 25 Standard, which means that the infrastructure and all mobile and portable radios meet certain requirements mandated for public-safety digital communications systems.
At the time of the Hayman Fire, the statewide infrastructure provided coverage for Douglas, Jefferson and Weld counties; the Denver metropolitan area; and all of eastern Colorado. These areas are part of the Consolidated Communications Network of Colorado, formed in 1997 to govern the operation of the future statewide communication systems infrastructure.
The nucleus of the statewide system actually is a shared Motorola system installed in Douglas and Jefferson counties in 1998. Digital portable radios and mobiles were purchased for use with the system, and these units, along with radio units from all over the state and loaners from the manufacturer, were used during the fire.
The system enabled dispatchers to deliver constant updates to firefighters as they battled adverse conditions that included 80°F weather, unpredictable winds, steep and rocky terrain, narrow winding roads, and a drought that was ravaging the West in the summer of 2002. The potential fire threat to even more of Colorado's land was always present.
“If the fire pushed more toward Colorado Springs, it could have gone to 200,000 acres,” Rhodes says. “If it had jumped across I-25, 400,000 acres might have been lost. And although Denver wasn't threatened at the time, there was the potential to lose 3,000 homes if the fire changed course.”
The seemingly unstoppable fire spread so rapidly that fire commanders divided their efforts into 18 divisions: The south command was responsible for 13 divisions from Lake George to Denver's Cheesman Reservoir, and a north command covered five divisions in Jefferson and Douglas counties. The fire was just 40 miles southwest of downtown Denver and 30 miles east of Colorado Springs.
The dependability of the technology improved the overall safety of the firefighters out on the line, says Rhodes: “I went into the fire-ravaged areas at night to do reconnaissance and had no problem communicating with other agencies. This fire covered an enormous acreage, making communication between southern and northern areas crucial.”
In addition to making cross-agency communication efficient, the technology would have allowed communications to continue even if Douglas County's main antenna tower at West Creek failed.
“West Creek served as the primary communications system during the fire, and all our consoles were routed through there, so it would have had a huge impact on our resources if it had burned,” says Coleman.
Not only would dispatch communications have come to a halt if West Creek had burned, but connectivity would have been lost to Silver Heights and Daniels Park radio sites, which carry a large portion of Douglas County's emergency services traffic. The new technological flexibility, however, would have incident command to reroute system traffic from West Creek to a backup site at Cheyenne Mountain that had been reprogrammed to function like West Creek. “We would have been able to replace the connectivity at West Creek within minutes, if necessary,” Coleman says.
Douglas County Public Works joined in the effort to protect the West Creek site, putting together a bulldozer team and digging a 50-foot firebreak around the West Creek site to prevent burning trees from falling into the site compound. The county also monitored the power lines to check if West Creek lost electricity. All of these efforts paid off; the site experienced only minor losses in coverage.
“We had the ability to program our way out of the situation, so it didn't require a hardware solution,” says Coleman. “If it had been a standalone system, we would not have had these alternatives. And if the fire had continued north toward another critical tower in Jefferson County, we would have faced a similar situation.”
The program solution worked because the team included county and state technicians and engineers from Motorola who knew the minute-by-minute path of all routers and towers.
“With dozens of sites up and running, you need to know how each one is doing,” Coleman says. The team thought of various potential scenarios and then developed solutions around each of them. For instance, if a tower was lost due to power feeds burning, a generator could be used as backup.
“We worked with the power company to ensure that replacing the generator, if needed, was a top priority,” says Don Christensen, under-sheriff for Douglas County. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office also was contacted and asked to top off its generator tank in the event power was lost. However, because the fire approached more rapidly than expected, the vendor assigned with topping off the generator had to be evacuated.
“Now that we have these scenarios in place, we can use them for other events we might encounter, such as lightning strikes,” says Coleman.
Adds Rhodes, “We all understood this system was composed of more than just radios. It's a computer with a software package with a transceiver built into it — a communications device that can do lots of things.”
Channels for multiple agencies, planned into the system from the start, played a big role in expediting communications.
A total of 21 mutual aid channels are available on the statewide system, and emergency responders had access to at least three of these channels during the fire. That enabled public safety agencies to handle communications in their own jurisdictions without interfering with the decision-making of the group managing the fire.
This was immensely important, because as Rhodes says, “Kids will still choke, men will still have heart attacks — everyday emergencies will continue to happen whether or not the biggest fire in Colorado's history is raging. In fact, our call load increased because the smoke coming into the city caused more respiratory problems. With the new technology, I was able to keep this regular traffic on our normal dispatch channels.”
Rhodes reserved operational and fireground channels exclusively for fire-related communication. “That gave us the flexibility to freely and rapidly communicate when needed, especially in evacuation situations,” he says. “We were in constant communication with law enforcement and emergency management agencies, schools and parks as evacuation of communities became necessary.” In all, 20 communities were either evacuated or were on standby to evacuate.
“Every firefighter carried a radio and listened to a specific channel assigned for crew members,” Rhodes says. “Being able to talk to each one of our firefighters on these channels and direct them to specific tasks was critical in transmitting and executing evacuation orders and reallocating resources.”
The private fire channels also enabled frank, tactical conversations. “When you can call a fellow fire chief and freely tell him ‘you're in the wrong area, get your people out now,’ that can be lifesaving,” says Rhodes.
In the end, it was the combination of fearless firefighters, dedicated public safety agencies, hardworking technicians and sophisticated technology that suppressed the fire.
“Without the teamwork and group participation, the result could easily have been more catastrophic,” says Christensen. “The shared technical and operational resources of staff, equipment and knowledge created a model of how communications interoperability can make a joint emergency response work smoothly.”
Deputy Chief Robert F. Weller is a 31-year employee of the Colorado Springs Fire Department. In 1995, he was assigned as acting support services captain, which required direct supervision and leadership of many ongoing projects regarding facilities, communications and planning, and apparatus procurement and maintenance. He then was promoted to deputy chief of the support services division. Weller currently is the acting system manager of the Pikes Peak Regional Radio Communications Network Agency, a joint venture with the City of Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Utilities and El Paso County.
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