Comms Status During Hurricane Frances

[N4DES]

Well it's now almost 1 AM and I'm happy to report that the Palm Beach County System (813a) is still operating. There are some issues with 1 of the 10 sites, but we are still in wide area trunking and the console connectivity is still in good shape. Comments in the hallway by County staff that they are very pleased that we are still communicating.

Boca Raton and Delray Beach sites are disconnected from the SmartZone Controller and are currently in Site Trunking. I can't check any alarms from their sites currently.

Boynton seems to be in good shape also and continues to trunk in wide-area.

 

[N4DES]

Well almost a week later and this is some of the highlights:

Spend 2 nights in the County EOC. Slept on the equipment room floor for about 4 hours each night due to complete exaustion. I worked the other 20 hours straight. Right now I'm working about 10 to 15 hours a day and today power was restored to my house.

The 800 Simulcast System that I mange took some damage. Specificially generators (water intrusion), UPS from power surges, and slight antenna damage (water in connectors causing high VSWR). The system did go off the air as you probably heard and due to replacement generators that were unreliable kept us from going back live. Its a long story, but were back.

The analog microwave system had almost all of its dishes twisted and they need to be re-aligned. I currently have a tower crew doing their thing putting it all together. The analog system carrys the traffic for the old MEDCOM, FR, and Sheriff MDT systems. We also took some VHF and UHF antenna damage as well.

As for the cell companies, the only one that continued to work was Verizon. NEXTEL, AT&T, Cingular, and Sprint all fell on their faces. I laughed the NEXTEL gov't rep out of the EOC when she came to ask where she should put the COW. I politely told her down the street ( I really meant up her but) so she didn't interfere with a REAL 800 MHz. RADIO SYSTEM that was operational all the way thru the storm and continues to operate.

 

[K5MAR]

COW?? What's that? (Other than a large meat animal, of course.) Glad you are in decent shape!

Mark S.

 

[mikey60]

COW?? What's that? (Other than a large meat animal, of course.) Glad you are in decent shape!

COW = Cell On Wheels. A portable cell site.

Mike

 

[K5MAR]

Ahhhh!
Thank you!

Mark S.

 

[blantonl]

Mark, thanks for the update.

I had to bite my lip when I saw your post here, and then the news reports a few hours later.

A clear cut case of Murphy's law in action.

 

[N4DES]

Yep sure was a case of Murphy's law.

One thing for sure is that it's so easy for them to forget that we have been in operation for over 3 years with no outages at all, yet we get a blackeye for an outage that occurs after a pretty major hurricane hits the region. Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't of gone down, it's unrealistic to think that we never will, but these guys (especially PBCFR) never go past Zone C on their radio to find the NPSPAC MA repeaters and learn how to turn them on. Shame on them as they could of kept on operating.

Sometimes those guys aren't happy unless they are complaining about something.