Dixie fire frequencies.

[cajunjerry]

Please remove and post where these would go if needed

 

[zerg901]

- Kathyrn Davidson reporting on Dixie Fire - she is very good - not pulling any punches - has FLIR cams and more

-------------------------------

from 8/9/2021 - radio info etc

Mobile Retardant Base Deer Creek MRB 40° 16.245' N 121° 25.990' W

Mobile Retardant Base Chester MRB (Ground Fill Only) 40° 16.903' N 121° 14.376' W

Mobile Retardant Base Mill MRB 39° 56.133' N 120° 53.669' W

Repeater Bald Eagle Mtn CMD 2 Tone 2 39° 56.394' N 121° 14.220' W

Repeater Colby CMD 47 Tone 2 40° 08.772' N 121° 31.304' W

Repeater Turner Logistics Hub L7 40° 17.937' N 121° 37.042' W

Repeater C-46. C-10 Dyer Mountain 40° 14.345' N 121° 01.958' W

Repeater Bald Mtn Butte CMD 56 Tone 2 39° 57.333' N 121° 28.867' W

Repeater C-3, L-3 Claremont 39° 53.005' N 120° 56.763' W

Repeater Red Hill - NIFC C57 40° 02.169' N 121° 11.204' W

Repeater C-12 Kettle Rock 40° 08.452' N 120° 43.530' W

Repeater C-8 Spanish Peak 39° 56.073' N 121° 07.594' W

Repeater 39° 54.139' N 121° 14.979' W

Repeater Mt. Harkness Repeater 40° 25.877' N 121° 18.101' W

Repeater C-30 Roop Mountain 40° 28.221' N 120° 48.670' W

Repeater Pegleg Lookout NIFC C2 40° 24.365' N 120° 57.122' W

Sling Site Lavassi Sling 1 39° 55.201' N 121° 10.448'

--------------------------------

from 7/29

Dixie Dip Site SPI Lumber Mill 39° 56.533' N 120° 54.436' W

Dixie Dip Site Snake Lake 39° 58.597' N 121° 00.444' W

Dixie Helibase Oroville Heli Base 39° 29.349' N 121° 37.139' W

Dixie Helibase Quincy Helibase 39° 56.637' N 120° 56.750' W

Dixie Helispot H-1 39° 44.290' N 121° 29.550' W

Dixie Helispot H-2 Type III 39° 58.980' N 121° 23.950' W

Dixie Hot Spot - Spot Fire 40° 09.017' N 121° 05.139' W

Dixie Mobile Retardant Base Bucks MRB 39° 52.111' N 121° 10.550' W

Dixie Mobile Retardant Base Deer Creek MRB 40° 16.245' N 121° 25.990' W

Dixie Mobile Retardant Base Chester MRB (Ground Fill Only) 40° 16.903' N 121° 14.376' W

Dixie Mobile Retardant Base Mill MRB 39° 56.133' N 120° 53.669' W

Dixie Repeater Bald Eagle Mtn CMD 2 Tone 2 39° 56.394' N 121° 14.220' W

Dixie Repeater Colby CMD 47 Tone 2 40° 08.772' N 121° 31.304' W

Dixie Repeater Turner Logistics Hub L7 40° 17.937' N 121° 37.042' W

Dixie Repeater Dyer Mtn. NIFC C-46 40° 14.345' N 121° 01.958' W

Dixie Repeater Bald Mtn Butte CMD 56 Tone 2 39° 57.333' N 121° 28.867' W

Dixie Repeater NIFC C-3 39° 53.005' N 120° 56.763' W

Dixie Repeater Red Hill - NIFC C57 40° 02.169' N 121° 11.204' W

Dixie Repeater NIFC C-12 40° 08.452' N 120° 43.530' W

Dixie Repeater NIFC C-8 39° 51.708' N 121° 10.599' W

Dixie Repeater NIFC C-30 40° 02.407' N 120° 58.340' W

Dixie Sling Site Lavassi Sling 1 39° 55.201' N 121° 10.448' W

 

[zerg901]

8/11/2021 - heard via Broadcastify at 431 pm edt on Lassen County fire feed - new repeater in service to serve the Janesville area - on ? Thompson ? Peak - "is" or "on" "Command" X

in other words - the new repeater is on some "Peak" and has a Command channel name, or is on a certain Command channel freq

message was somewhat broken to me and/or it caught me by surprise - in other words - if someone wants check the tape, they can probably snag the details

 

[es93546]

A nearly 12 hour presentation. There is no way I have the time to watch it all. I skipped through a little bit of it. She rambles about fire suppression and obviously has no expertise in it. The governor of California has no jurisdiction on National Forest land. She advocates total fire suppression, the very thing that got us into this mess. The governor has nothing to do with the federal fire management budget.

 

[zerg901]

listening to the tape it sounds like they said Command 58 is the new repeater on Thompson Peak to serve the Janesville and Highway 58 corridor - it is at 29:37 on the 101 pm tape on Weds

at the same time on the tape there was an EMS call at Sierra Army Depot - Engine 1921 was onscene and Medic 6 was responding - commmand freq was "Lassen County Fire" and tac channel was "CalCord" - no paging tones were heard

 

[zerg901]

per Dixie Fire | Welcome to CAL FIRE

Dixie Fire

Resources Assigned
CAL FIRE owns and operates over 3,000 fire and emergency response and resource protection vehicles. In support of its ground forces, the CAL FIRE emergency response air program includes 23 Grumman S-2T 1,200 gallon airtankers, 12 UH-1H Super Huey helicopters, and 16 OV-10A airtactical. From 13 air attack and 10 helitack bases located statewide, aircraft can reach most fires within 20 minutes.
20 Helicopters

515 Engines

198 Dozers

175 Water Tenders

6,133 Personnel

81 Crews

 

[norcalscan]

A nearly 12 hour presentation. There is no way I have the time to watch it all. I skipped through a little bit of it. She rambles about fire suppression and obviously has no expertise in it. The governor of California has no jurisdiction on National Forest land. She advocates total fire suppression, the very thing that got us into this mess. The governor has nothing to do with the federal fire management budget.

You are very correct Ex. There is work being done right now to actually try and limit her spread of this misinformation on YouTube (queue up the censorship crowd.) She is presenting it as fact instead of opinion, and she has been causing some undue stress to listeners who are local to the area. She knows not what she talks about, misinterprets everything on the radio and provides little to no context. And the FLIR cams she shows she has no idea how to read/interpret so she scared a LOT of people saying a huge wall of flame was coming right at them, when indeed, it was not.

Edit: now that I see I'm in the Fed Monitoring Forum, take note the posted fed band frequencies other than the standard NIFC Commands 1-12 and NIFC Tacs are all temp assignments for the incident only, and will vaporize when the incident does.

 

[zerg901]

Kathyrn Davidson seems very intelligent and well spoken. Dont know who you guys are talking about.

 

[norcalscan]

Kathyrn Davidson seems very intelligent and well spoken. Dont know who you guys are talking about.

Which makes her all the more dangerous to the locals listening to her every syllable and acting on it as if she has any authority in the subject matter, and causing a lot of chaos in the local rural communities who don't know any better, and unending work for the incident public information dept to repair. To a scanner jockey though I can see how her content is pure gold. That is the problem with our society and social media, every voice suddenly has equal authority and we don't bother to vet them because just yesterday, the organic vetting process was years and years of peer approval and promotions to get to have a platform to speak to the masses. Now it's a USB mic and youtube account and get the right keywords to intercept the search results.

 

[es93546]

Kathyrn Davidson seems very intelligent and well spoken. Dont know who you guys are talking about.

I don't want to go into a lot of detail as to why I stated what I did in my post above. She is obviously speaking of a subject or subjects that she knows nothing about. If you don't know wildland fire management subject well you might think she is well spoken, but if you know the subjects you cringe listening to her. She doesn't even understand basic civics regarding state jurisdiction and federal jurisdiction. Advocating for total fire suppression is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I studied fire ecology as a senior in high school, managed land, been on over 100 wildfires, have ignited prescribed fires and generally have spent decades in the woods and on wild lands. I've backpacked in some very remote places in 8 states, run rivers and have driven a few hundred thousand miles on dirt roads. I've lived inside the boundaries of 3 National Forests and could stare out my windows of the 4th one I worked on. I've lived in the eastern Sierra nearly 40 years now (2 months short) and have been able to watch various trends such as the health of vegetation, ecosystems, wildlife, erosion, water quality, impacts from people and forest conditions such as tree density, surface dead fuel buildup, tree health, ladder fuels, invasions of species that don't normally grow over the long term (species that are more flammable) and many other issues.

In the 1950's research papers and conferences began to make a prediction. If we didn't change the total fire suppression policy on federal public lands, state lands and private lands 100,000 acre stand replacement (organic layer in the soil all the way up to the tops of the tallest trees consumed by fire) fires would become commonplace by the end of the century. The entire land management professional community had memorized this prediction. I began reading the research in the late 1960's as a high school student. Not only did I read the scientific literature I also attended a presentation by one of the leading university professors of forestry and fire ecology. He ignited a small prescribed fire, this about a mile west of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park on the University of California, Berkeley school forest. It was the first time I ever had a lit drip torch in my hands.

I then attended a university outside California to get my Bachelor of Science in Forestry. After that experience on Berkeley's school forest in my early 20's I then I watched fuel buildups for my entire career, watched fires getting more intense and larger and watched presidential administrations, congressmen, state politicians and the public handcuff the land management agencies who were trying to change policy. Those who advocated reintroducing fire into wildland ecosystems were called "radicals" by conservative politicians and the public. The old Bambi movie theme of green is good and black is bad perspective was thoroughly implanted in our culture. I spoke to National Forest visitors in the field, at get togethers with friends, at summer youth camps, community groups and similar about this growing crisis and what we needed to do in order to minimize the crisis we were quickly moving toward. That end of the century predication began to surface around 1987 and a few years in the 90's. In 2000 multiple stand replacement fires large than 100,000 acres burned simultaneously all over the west, especially in the northern Rockies. The public has to get used to some areas of forest burning and being black. We need to manage wildland fire in a manner that the natural fire regime is restored. When we jump on every fire start we are just pouring more gasoline into a can and the result is a bigger, more destructive fire. We need some mechanical fuel reductions, thinning of the younger portion (the understory, underneath the tallest and oldest trees) of the forest. We need to pile that fuel and burn it during times of higher humidity, cooler temperatures and higher fuel moisture. We then need to conduct prescribed burns in those treated areas. We then need to build fuelbreaks around towns where wildlands are close by. We need to manage fire in a way to reduce the chances of intense fires burning up structures.

People should also be cautious about anyone speaking of solving this problem by cutting more sawtimber (lumber) trees, claiming that the fire problem is due to not harvesting enough of these trees. Extensive research has produced data showing that method misses the problem and actually results in higher ground fuel loads than existed prior to the harvest. The older, large overstory trees are the most fire resistant vegetation in the forest. Advocating for more timber sales is just a greater and quicker profit motivated message. It includes removing sensible environmental restrictions placed on the timber industry. Timber sales were the order of the day from about 1945 to the early 1990's and it did not help the fire hazard situation. In fact, the hazard was growing that entire time.

Climate change was something the research of the 1950-1980 period did not foresee. Rising temperatures have caused some profound changes in forests. When you combine the predicted fuel buildup crisis with the burning conditions intensified by higher temperatures, lower relative humidity and lower fuel moisture the result is what we are seeing all over the western U.S., Canada, Australia and some European countries. Now, this summer large fires are burning in Siberia. Observed fire behavior is unprecedented and is moving to more intense and extreme conditions as the years pass.

I watched about 10 minute of this while skipping forward several times. What I was hearing was so inaccurate that I could not bear to continue. She stated at the beginning of the video she would not be discussing politics and then proceeds to do exactly that.

Sorry for the length of this message. I just barely skimmed over the subject as it is complex. It is difficult to present the education and experience of nearly a lifetime. I'm experiencing measurable cognitive decline and its getting more challenging to express myself. My apologies.

 

[es93546]

per Dixie Fire | Welcome to CAL FIRE

Dixie Fire

Resources Assigned
CAL FIRE owns and operates over 3,000 fire and emergency response and resource protection vehicles. In support of its ground forces, the CAL FIRE emergency response air program includes 23 Grumman S-2T 1,200 gallon airtankers, 12 UH-1H Super Huey helicopters, and 16 OV-10A airtactical. From 13 air attack and 10 helitack bases located statewide, aircraft can reach most fires within 20 minutes.
20 Helicopters

515 Engines

198 Dozers

175 Water Tenders

6,133 Personnel

81 Crews

I don't know if that 3,000 vehicle count includes the extensive fleet of California Office of Emergency Service reserve engines, widely dispersed all over the state. I don't recall the count, perhaps 400 Type 1 and Type 3 engines and some water tenders. They are assigned to county and municipal fire departments to operate as reserve engines in their own jurisdictions. However, when these apparatus are needed for mutual aid and large incidents the department is required to provide the engine and staffing for as long as the incident management team needs them. Cal OES pays maintenance costs, the purchase of the engine and pays to have the equipment staffed. It is really impressive to watch multiple OES engine strike teams arrive on a fire, especially if you are working a major fire after being on the initial attack. To see your little fire camp of 30 people grow into a camp of 3,000 people in one shift is really great thing to see. The state can quickly produce more engines on a fire than probably any government in the world. This is in addition to strike teams formed from county and local fire departments using their primary protection apparatus.

 

[zerg901]

Dixie Fire West Zone Live Audio Feed - new live scanner audio feed at Broadcastify - Dixie Fire West Zone Command Channel - just heard a kerchunk so we know the feed is active at 1034 am edt - (1052 am edt - talking about 4 dozers at 36 and 147 - google maps shows me that 36 and 147 do intersect at westwood california - and we know there is alot of fire action at westwood now - saw it live via facebook)

note - the Lassen County fire feed has been carrying lots of Dixie Fire traffic - the receiver might be in the Janesville area

 

[zerg901]

https://ftp.wildfire.gov/public/incident_specific_data/calif_n/!CALFIRE/!2021_Incidents/CA-BTU-009205_Dixie/GIS/Products/20210815/Briefing 17x17.jpg - 4/14/ map for the Dixie Fire - all repeaters are shown

or

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1426907410820603904

===================

went over the map twice - this should be all of the repeaters

all repeaters are Tone 2 - except Logistics Hubs ("L" / UHF) (which
have no tones listed) - and except Dyer Mtn C46 which is Tone 3

all repeaters are listed as "NIFC Cx" - (except logistics and Claremont)

Repeater Site - Channels

Claremont - C3 + L3

west of spanish peak - no channels indicated

Bald Mtn - C56

Spanish Peak - C8 - (?NIFC C8?)

Kettle Rock - C12

Red Hill - C57

Fredonyr - L4

Antelope - C89

Shaffer Mtn - C91

Roop Mtn - C30 + C76

Lassen Peak - C31

Pegleg LO - C2

Turner - L7

Westwood - C95

Dyer Mtn - C10 + C46 - (C46 is T3)

Thompson Peak - C68 - near Janesville

Colby Mtn - C47

all of these command repeaters might be divided into 2 nets - east and west

----------------------


Monday / Tuesday could be a wild day for the fire - per forecasted weather

 

[RaleighGuy]

Freq lists for today, some are missing, some are duplicated on other images, couldn't find freq #13

 

[norcalscan]

Let's not make this harder than it has to be.

First, the Comms Link Map (large 18MB PDF) shows each portable repeater location and how they're linked. The Command Net map (5MB JPG) shows the three separate command net zones that are running on the incident.

Second, when you get access to the Incident Action Plan, ignore all the ICS204's and their frequency assignments (what was posted above me.) What you're looking for further in the IAP is the ICS205 and the ICS220 to get the incident-wide comm plan, and the air operations summary which has the air-only assignments. I've attached them below.

 

[es93546]

This is amazing. I'm not sure I've seen such a complex incident in my life! I've yet to study the documents everyone has posted. I was real interested in the term "sector" being used again. I haven't seen it since the early 1980's. It was the old term for what is a division now. The command system the USFS had was simply called the "Large Fire Organization." I'm trying to figure out the organization of the fire so I'm going to get the appropriate form in the IAP. It looks like it would take more than one page, but who knows? I would love to be able to just hang out at the ICP or would that be "ICP's." The largest fire I was on was the North Fork Fire in the Yellowstone NP complex of 1988 at about 450,000 acres. We had two incident camps, the fire was too large for everyone to stay in one camp due to the travel times. I never got a chance to figure out the comm system and didn't save any IAP's from the incident, something I do regret. We had a luggage weight limit that was strictly enforced as we boarded the plane to come home. We all just barely weighed in at the limit, the T Shirts we bought were heavy! If I saved any paper it would have put me over the limit as I came very close to it. The T Shirts are long gone, but I still have the hat. I should wear it somewhere sometime instead of keeping it on my "hat shelf."

 

[norcalscan]

I was real interested in the term "sector" being used again.

It is quite the complex incident for sure. Only the second time a CalFire team has ever transitioned to another team also, usually the team has the fire for "life" with a few individual change-outs/reliefs as needed. In this case the entire team transitioned for a breather. Another first is the fire going from one side of the Sierra's to the other.

For Sector, it was used last year on the August Complex West Zone, which was roughly a 60 mile length of CalFire-managed piece of the fire. It improves span of control in a portion of the "pure-classroom ICS" that is weak on rapidly expanding span of control. It sits between Branch Director and Ops Chief, and is staffed by a Deputy Ops Chief. Instead of adding more Zones, or an even more disruptive a second Operations Section (which happened on Yellowstone it sounds like) slowing down any rapid tactical decision making needed on an incident like this, it keeps it all in the same Zone, and tactical decisions/orders can be made right at Deputy Ops between neighboring Branch Directors vs trying to get Ops Chief ear.

I was up much earlier in the fire assisting with law comms side, which is ad-hoc two tin-cans and a string compared to the pre-determined solid NIFC command infrastructure available to the fire COML. Unfortunately, law has to resort to tin-cans and string if Fire takes the VTACS for fire ground, and goes rogue spinning up UTAC in fire camp without notifying the proper coordinating authorities.