On the first night of the fires in Sonoma County, large swaths of the region lost cell phone coverage and internet connectivity, as Verizon and Comcast coverage took a big hit. At the height of the destruction, as many as 77 cell towers were taken off the grid. Despite swift reaction times from the providers, the loss of communications was costly in the first, most hectic hours of the firestorm.
In the Town of Windsor emergency operations center, the staff cast aside their Verizon cell phones in favor of landline phones to gather information on Oct. 9. In the inferno overtaking Larkfield and Fountaingrove, Windsor Fire Protection District personnel similarly all used Verizon phones.
“When the network went down we lost all of our map data,” said Fire Prevention Officer Cyndi Foreman. “And visual landmarks weren’t any help, either. The little blue house on the corner wasn’t the little blue house on the corner anymore.”
Verizon tends to have better signal strength around the disparate areas of the county than its major competitor AT&T, so it’s little surprise that several agencies use the carrier for their cell phone fleets.
County spokesman Scott Alonso said that the county has 1,600 Verizon devices, including cell phones, tablets and computers. They were all essentially as useful as a calculator on the first night of the fires. With radio dispatch channels congested with emergency responders trying to get people out of harm’s way, those attempting to bring order to the chaos resorted to finding a friend with an AT&T phone which was still functioning, despite losing effectiveness due to cell tower loss.
Verizon had repaired 98 percent of the lost functionality by Oct. 11, according to a statement from the company.
It wasn’t only cell coverage that took a hit during the fires. Comcast’s service was also broadly disrupted. Though service was repaired by late Tuesday, Oct. 10 in some parts of the north county, the loss of internet and television meant that many people attempting to track the fires were left with precious few options for gathering intelligence. This newspaper is one of many local businesses that use Comcast for internet connectivity and phones, and editors faced the prospect of hand carrying files directly to the printer to get the paper out by print deadline.
Local utility Sonic managed to keep much of its own internet coverage online through Oct. 9.
Sonic did lose service to businesses in the Fountaingrove business park, as the area experienced heavy fire damage.
“The fiber line that ran above ground to the business area was burned and damaged,” Sonic owner Dane Jasper wrote in an email. “Even in spots where the line was buried, the fire scorched the fiber through the vaults that provide ground-level access.”
To get internet service back to this area as soon as possible, the Sonic team raced, working through the weekend to restore coverage, Jasper said. Since some of the poles that carried fiber there still had to be replaced by PG&E, Sonic crews built a new three-mile stretch of infrastructure through an unaffected area from downtown Santa Rosa to Fountaingrove. Now that the poles are back in place, Sonic is also restoring the original line.
“For residential customers, this disaster highlighted the importance of having a wired home phone service and telephone,” Jasper said. “During a power outage, cordless phones do not work, so a wired phone line and a basic wired telephone on the bedside table is really worth having. This allows for emergency calls, including ‘reverse 911’ robocalls from emergency services, school notifications, etc.”
Coming up with a strategy for internet redundancy is also critical for businesses, Jasper wrote. “Today, it’s very challenging for workers to remain productive without [internet] access, and assuring reliability during disasters, cable cuts or even simply equipment failures is really important,” he said. “We will make a point of addressing this better with our business clients in the future.”
For the county’s part, Alonso said staff was already looking at an after-action report on the disaster, with an eye to perhaps diversifying its communications infrastructure. He added that county employees have been weighing in on the loss of communications, too.
For Sonic, it will be some time before the company can return to business as usual.
“Sonic is working with North Bay businesses that can’t return to their offices yet, or don’t have offices to return to, to ensure next-day connections if they relocate in an area where Sonic has fiber,” Jasper said. “And for residential customers who lost their homes, Sonic is providing assistance with email service, and home telephone number forwarding at no charge.”
Sonic has also been helping its employees impacted by the fire — three of whom who lost their homes — to find a path back to normalcy. During the fire, Sonic’s headquarters became a shelter for around 35 employees and their family members, plus plenty of dogs, cats and even a hamster.”
