The communications outage on Wednesday, Nov. 12, prevented people from calling outside the North Fork Valley. Local phone service within Paonia, Hotchkiss, Crawford and Somerset was still available, but most cellular service was down as were pagers, the Internet and most importantly, 911 dispatch. With the outage, local law enforcement, fire departments and town staff mobilized to handle the situation. Most people who failed to reach 911 did call their town hall or local police to report their emergency. It was then radioed to Delta County dispatch. The outage was caused by a fiber optic cable cut near Payne Siding. Service was down from 10:30 a.m. until 4 p.m., when a temporary repair by TDS field service technicians was accomplished. Permanent repairs were completed between midnight and 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13.The potential of much greater danger to the public was averted by quick actions of local authorities and some luck. Staff at Paonia Town Hall contacted schools, nursing homes, banks and the coal mines of the problem and advised them to call Paonia Town Hall directly in case of an emergency. Jim Kiger of Oxbow Mine said they were in touch with Paonia Police as was Bowie Resources dispatch. They were told a radio would be taken to each mine from local law enforcement so the mines could have their own contact with Delta dispatch. Service was restored before that was done.Rob Fiedler, Emergency Preparedness Coordinator, said ham radio operators with Amateur Radio Emergency Service were established in each town of the county to assist in emergency communications and were also available to go up to the mines.Hotchkiss Fire Chief Doug Fritz communicated with the Paonia fire chief and North Fork Ambulance. North Fork Ambulance established a radio link with Delta County Memorial Hospital.The only broadcast outlet in the North Fork Valley is KVNF Public Radio. Jeff Reynolds, KVNF Operations Manager, contacted Delta County authorities when the outage occurred, and coordinated the message to their listeners to call local police departments if they had an emergency since 911 was not working. “[The Emergency Preparedness Department] was in the process of doing what was called a non-weather related emergency over the National Weather Alert System which would have gone to everybody who had a weather radio and then it would have gone to all the broadcast stations in the area and then they would have broadcast it,” Rob Fiedler said. “Which is fine if people have a weather radio or had their radios on. I think the glaring thing is that there is no one cure all when this happens.” The message would also have been broadcast on cable television.Doug Fritz had to work on ways to contact his firemen. He couldn’t call all of them or page them to turn on their radios. “We were trying to get the ham radio operators to contact our paging system and that guy was not available because his phone was dead.”Hotchkiss Marshal Dan Miller reported, “People knew enough to call here [if they had a land line phone].” Of course that still left those who use cell phones exclusively isolated and without service. Hotchkiss only had to relay a couple of calls to Delta dispatch during the outage. Colorado State Patrol could have also been reached by radio.A post event review was conducted on Tuesday, Nov. 18 with TDS, the Emergency Preparedness Department, and local authorities to discuss what went right and what went wrong on Nov. 12. Everyone is in agreement that some kind of a back up system has to be in place. Marshal Miller said the focus of Homeland Security is to make sure there are redundant systems functioning and capable of handling any emergency. “Sometimes it takes something like this to show us what our weak points are,” he added. “One possibility that will be looked at is having one police vehicle in the town that people can go to and report an emergency,” Fiedler suggested. How information can reach those who live out of town will have to be discussed. “This brought up some very glaring deficiencies and the problem is this was a fiber optic cable and that was the only means for land line communication to the North Fork. There is no back up system. No one recalls this ever happening before. There were a few cell towers working, but it represents a very real problem, and quite frankly I don’t know how you address that unless you have the phone companies agree to have some kind of a back up system or a bridge system to switch it over to another routing and I don’t know if that is in place or not.”Fiedler reported one of the VHF radio towers was also down on Nov. 12. The Jumbo Mountain tower is being repaired. The Bureau of Land Management will be putting a temporary repeater above Paonia. The 800 frequencies were all working which allowed for the radio communications from the North Fork Valley to Delta. “We have back up. That worked exactly as it was supposed to,” Fiedler said.Fire Chief Fritz concluded, “The biggest issue is how do you get the word to people that they are supposed to call a different number than 911. That is the more difficult thing to figure out. I just don’t know how you communicate with the population when the phones don’t work.”Fritz wondered if there would be a way to intercept all the 911 calls coming out of the North Fork to the fire station and have a dispatch there. “But I don’t know, number one, if that is possible and number two, I don’t know if that is fool-proof. There are a lot of calls coming in. What happens when people start getting busy signals. And number three, there are so many details to it I think you set up a whole bunch of unintended consequences.I don’t know what the smart thing is to do in this particular circumstance. But there has been a lot of work done at the station to operate without the use of telephones. The ham folks have come in and set up repeaters, and they can link to the phone system. They are familiar with operating out of the station.“I think there is an advantage that everyone has and that is the phone offices are fairly independent. Even though we were cut off from the rest of the world we had good communication in the North Fork between the communities. That’s something we should try to build on.“We got through this one, but this let’s us know we have to do a little work to get us through the next one. Because we have that local phone office in Hotchkiss we were able to keep all the local phones up in the North Fork that was a benefit. We just need to figure out how to utilize that for any future outages.”
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