i need to know if the park ranger on the delaware national water gap in pennsylvania have gone to encrypted communication, i was not able to listen to them today on my bcd39t on the frequency of 168.475. i would really apprenciate an answer. thanks :?: :?:
i have a question about the national park service
- Thread starter skip39
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RyltnVFD
Member
I would think that if they had switched to encrypted communications, you would most likely be able to hear the encrypted signal.
Have you been hearing any odd noises or strange speech?
It is also possible that they may have migrated to a different type of radio system, possibly a TRS.
Have you been hearing any odd noises or strange speech?
It is also possible that they may have migrated to a different type of radio system, possibly a TRS.
i have been hearing data bursts on my bcd396t should say whether the frequency is encrypted or clear. why would the national park service go encrypted. most of the comms is nonsense.!!!
can someone please me tell me if the national park service rangers with the delaware water gap have gone encrypted. i would really appreciate an answer :?:
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Can you give us an audio clip so that we would know what it might be your hearing?
There could be a frequency change. It could be pager or data or in fact encryption.
Post your question in the Delaware forum. :idea: Boo!-Poltergeisty :-0
There could be a frequency change. It could be pager or data or in fact encryption.
Post your question in the Delaware forum. :idea: Boo!-Poltergeisty :-0
RyltnVFD
Member
Good idea. Plus, we can't help that much if we don't know what these noises sound like, or if we don't have a good description.
I was just listening to them yesterday (7/13) on the south channel (170.050), and I heard ASTRO in the clear from dispatchers, Rangers, & park maintenance...
the channel i was listening to was 168.475 on my bcd396t and the transmission like a data burst and a couple of days my scanner was picking the dispatch up clearly
skip39 said:
Encryption won't be a data *burst*. It will sound like data on most scanners, although it could sound like a burst of scrambled audio on the 396 since it mutes encrypted transmissions (but shows ENC on the display).
Joe M.
eyes00only
Member
skip39 said:
TOP SECRET ; where are they stocking fish this weekend :wink: .
Jerry
:wink: 8) 
skip39 said:
Is poaching a problem ?
Are hunters and fisherman not following the laws? At seventy thousand acres, that is a huge chunk of real estate to patrol.
Perhaps the authorities have noted their comm's being monitored and this
way they can thwart a person who has the desire to stay one-step-ahead of them.
Skip39,
If you have a 396, take a look at the display. next to the frequecy that shows up just below the text, frequency, or talk group and just above the systems being scanned. At the far right of that line you will see a three letter code, something like P25, DAT, LNK, or ENC.
Several local government agencies pooled their money and bought a P25 trunked system here. Some of their transmissions are encrypted. On my PRO96, I hear the encrypted transmission as garbage. On the 396, the display shows the letters END and P25 (they alternate) and there is NO audio during the encrypted transmission.
If you DO NOT see the ENC, then they chances are that they transmissions are not encrypted.
If you have a 396, take a look at the display. next to the frequecy that shows up just below the text, frequency, or talk group and just above the systems being scanned. At the far right of that line you will see a three letter code, something like P25, DAT, LNK, or ENC.
Several local government agencies pooled their money and bought a P25 trunked system here. Some of their transmissions are encrypted. On my PRO96, I hear the encrypted transmission as garbage. On the 396, the display shows the letters END and P25 (they alternate) and there is NO audio during the encrypted transmission.
If you DO NOT see the ENC, then they chances are that they transmissions are not encrypted.
bee
Member
I live near the Natchez Trace parkway in Mississippi--which is a part of the National Park Service. This parkway is a two lane road from Nashville Tn to Natchez Ms. about 450 miles in length. Parkway Rangers patrol this road. One could hear them talk--make trafic stops ect. --on 171.775 untill approx. 6-9-05, using a repeater system. I have been unable to find the new frequencies or a new system, which ever it may be. It appears we have the same problem. Being that they have moved frequencies or have a new system(the national park service). On 6-9-05 I heard the dispatcher tell a Ranger he would give him the new frquencies. I also heard him say they had a new system.
thanks for your help guys. i know that it is nonsense that the national park service uses p25 encryption.
Being retired from the U.S. Forest Service I have a little different take on this. Public lands have crime and Deleware Gap has a high amount of visitor use, especially if you count visits per acre per year. Some of that crime is very dangerous for law enforcement officers. Poaching is a big business, especially when you consider the market for bear gall bladders and elk antlers. In the eastern U.S. the black bear gall bladder fetches quite a price as they are in big demand in Asia. The higher the price, the higher the stakes, and enforcing the law can be very dangerous.
Same thing goes with drugs. Meth labs and pot plantations on public lands are a serious problem, in some areas a greater problem than on private land. In the east where there is so much private land and so much of the land is developed public lands attract this type of activity. In some cases there is more of this activity on public lands than there is on nearby private lands. The Feds can have more of a workload for this than the state and local officers. This is dependent on the location.
I don't think Deleware Gap is an exclusive jurisdiction like most of the older units of the National Park System in the west. In exclusive jurisdictions you have essentially a "Federal island" where the National Park Service not only has jurisdiction of natural resource law, but is the civil law enforcement agency for those lands where state and local agencies have no jurisdiction. Crime is high enough in one of these "islands", Yosemite National Park, to warrent a full time federal magistrate and 24 hour staffing for a jail. The Park Rangers at Yosemite have more exposure to officer safety issues and a higher workload than a lot of county sheriffs deputies in the west.
Most of the remainder of the National Park units are concurrent jurisdictions where the Feds or State and local agencies can have jurisdiction. In these cases National Park Service (NPS) rangers can use Federal law for all kinds of civil crimes and the state and local officers can use state law as well. A good example near where I live is Death Valley National Park where the CHP and Inyo County Sheriffs deputies patrol the state highway within the park and Inyo County has a resident deputy stationed in the joint NPS, State DOT, and Inyo County work center/residence area near Furnace Creek. The deputy is mainly there because Furnace Creek is private land and there is Shoshone tribal land adjacent to it, both within the boundaries of the National Park and county authority is needed in both those situations. The park is 3.3 million acres in size and the county is not capable of patrolling the entire park for "crimes against persons" law purposes and cannot provide emergency medical services either, so the arrangement is for the NPS to provide all of the EMS services, and is first responder on a lot of state and local law situations.
The same is true for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the latter being a relatively unknown agency in the east. The law enforcement officers on the Angeles National Forest in southern California often handle quite a bit of civil law enforcement under state law because of the long response times by L.A. County Sheriff deputies. The phrase among Angeles employees is that if all the dead bodies on the Forest rose from the dead it would increase the population of Los Angeles County by 10%, as this island of wildland in a sea of development is all to often the site of murders or the place murderers dispose of their deeds.
All law enforcement officers of the four public land management agencies in the Federal government (USFS, BLM, NPS, and the USFWS or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who have the fewest employees per acre of any of these agencies) attend the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glyncoe, Georgia. FLETC graduates are POST certified officers who have the authority to enforce state law depending on local circumstances and agreements and often, at least in the west, back up state and local officers and participate in interagency law enforcement responses within incorporated cities in areas where public land is close by. For the most part this is in predominately rural areas. The number of visits and law enforcement contacts made by these agencies is higher than the totals of many states combined. I don't have the current count, but it is in the hundreds of millions. The USFS Ranger District I retired from handles over four million visits per year.
I was not a full range law enforcement officer and did not carry defensive equipment (gun, stick, nasty aerosol spray, and silver bracelets) but did have law enforcement duties having to do with natural resources and use of National Forest land. I was often involved in disputes over campsites, entry violations (areas closed or restricted for safety purposes or for resource management reasons), wildlife (I had full authority to enforce state fish and game code), parking and traffic enforcement and direction, and often was first on scene of state crimes, traffic accidents, search and rescue, shootings, drunk drivers, and suicides. As an unarmed officer (called Forest Protection Officers or FPO's as opposed to LEO's) officer safety issues were critical and having radio communications was essential. In areas and periods of very high occupancy (1500-2000 visitors on 5 acres of land) where I was the only officer and my backup was 20 minutes or more away, I carried a shovel, not only to do routine trail maintenance as I patrolled but as a type of baton "just in case". The handle of a shovel can make a great defensive weapon in a pinch and being longer than a baton can, in limited circumstances, be more effective. I never had to use it to strike anyone but had to display it a couple of times to keep belligarant people from invading my space. As a field supervisor I averaged 4,000 contacts per year of which 800 or so were law enforcement related and this 800 didn't count the domestic disputes, missing person, theft and burglery, suicides, accidents, and fires (some arson) that I would often be the first officer of any kind to happen upon. None of this is the stuff of large urban areas with bank robberies, gang warfare, and murder/mayhem which many scanner listeners listen to, but it isn't nonsense either. Just supervising my employees, protecting them from highly emotional people behaving inappropriatly (code Adam Henry's), and keeping the toilets flushed, the water systems on, the bears protected from humans, the doors opening and closing, the shuttle busses running up and down the road, the entrance stations staffed, the fees collected, the pavement repaired, the buildings painted, the graffeti removed, the traffic flowing without gridlock, the fires extinquished, keeping people from destroying the resources, the trees from falling on people, and on and on kept me on the radio a lot, not to mention doing a high level of multi-tasking every moment of every day yearlong. For some of the law enforcement, especially in the winter when I was often the only employee in the field on several hundred thousand acres, I would have loved to been able to encrypt on occasion. In some areas I would pull up to several unoccupied cars and find one of more of them with a scanner on manual with our frequency displayed for everyone to see. This gives you somewhat of an uncomfortable feeling when you see it, considering it usually happened in problem prone areas.
During my career in three different states I was often 5, 10, 30, and sometimes up to 45 miles distant from the nearest person for 1-8 days at a time. No, I don't mean the nearest backup or fellow employee, I mean the nearest human being. Sometimes I would drop into radio dead areas for several hours or up to 2 days, both on foot and in a vehicle. That mobile or handheld was essential and routine check-ins could have been the only way they could find my body. I flew air patrol on dozens of occasions and in the great outdoors away from the big city you don't check in with the air traffic controlers at our low altitudes, but flight followed with the dispatch center. None of what I have mentioned even touches the dozen or so wildland fires I arrived first on scene for, with the closest second in units being 30-60 minutes away. I'm not including the single tree or 1/4 acre lightning strike fires with little immediate potential, but those that can make a person excited enough that the phrase "they sound like they are chewing on the microphone" applied to me when I first started and applied to even people with more than 20 years under their belt.
Try to imagine a 2 acre fire in heavy brush with 80 foot trees torching or crowning on the uphill side of the fire with an uphill wind and you just arrived alone with your Type 7 wildland patrol engine (50 - 200 gallons of water, pump rated at 10-29 gallons per minute at 100 PSI, and 200 feet of hose) and you are told the nearest air tanker is half of the state of Arizona away, and it will arrive sooner than many of the ground forces enroute. Imagine a 3 year old child missing from the banks of a springtime swollen creek and the next unit in is at least 10 minutes away and you can't hear your radio due to the child's mother screaming in your ear. 10 minutes that become like eternity. Imagine 8 large and full campgrounds, nearly 1000 vehicles, and Lord knows how many people in a narrow and heavily forested valley with a fire showing extreme fire behavior downcanyon with 35 mile per hour upcanyon winds and the only road out being a 18 foot wide paved road which has to go uphill 1500 feet in elevation. That fire having consumed 6,000 acres of upper elevation 100 foot tall mixed species conifers in a few hours. Now imagine being in charge of 10 people who got to evacuate this valley after you spent an entire night on that fire when it was only 500 acres with 38 people who walked in 8 miles to only begin to attempt stopping it. That fire having chewed up that 8 miles the next afternoon. I don't have to imagine any of these things.
In the southwestern U.S. public land units such as Organ Pipe National Monument, Big Bend National Park, the Coronado National Forest, BLM administered public lands, as well as a few National Wildlife Refuges are right on the Mexican border. Officer safety there is critical for land managment law enforcement officers as well as FPO's, and other agency personnel. Smuggling of drugs, aliens, and anything else you can think of is constant. The travel of illegals through the Cleveland and Coronado National Forests makes routine resource management work by biologists, foresters, botonists, hydrologists, engineers, and recreation management personnel, to just name a few, more risky than in other areas. Every employee of the USFS is required to check in and out when they go out in the field by radio with the dispatch center because of an incident 15 years or more ago, where an employee doing campground maintenance work was kidnapped, raped, and transported several hundred miles before being dumped on the side of a road after a couple of days of hell.
You see managing public lands and resources and providing outdoor recreation involves a lot of effort and hard work from a dwindling number of dedicated employees and people with enough dedication to start in the natural resource and outdoor recreation field in the first place. It is like the proverbial duck where everything looks placid on the surface with all the work going on where you might not see it. For most of the population they can't recognize a natural resource problem or even a crisis if it bit them in the nose. This is not an arrogant statement as land management is very complex and even with a keen interest in it starting in high school it took me many years after college to really grasp what it is all about.
Since I retired the post 9/11 atmosphere for full range law enforcement officers has changed. I'm seeing additional antennas on their vehicles and my former co-workers are evasive about what they are for. I know that some NPS and USFS law enforcement officers were involved during the 1992 L.A. riots and having them involved in homeland security task forces and such is a good guess as to what the antennas might are for.
As of 1/1/05 all federal agencies were required to convert to narrowband which is a 12.5 Khz spacing. They also were required to have digital capability. For routine communications the USFS is not using digital or encryption, at least locally. The narrowband stuff is more difficult to listen to as coverage of the repeaters has become more marginal making antenna and receiver sensitivity issues more critical. When radios are switched to digital, repeater coverage gets more marginal and the agencies, having already been required to replace every single radio in its inventory, cannot afford to add to the backbone system.
The point here being that "nonsense" is all in the eye of the beholder.
Same thing goes with drugs. Meth labs and pot plantations on public lands are a serious problem, in some areas a greater problem than on private land. In the east where there is so much private land and so much of the land is developed public lands attract this type of activity. In some cases there is more of this activity on public lands than there is on nearby private lands. The Feds can have more of a workload for this than the state and local officers. This is dependent on the location.
I don't think Deleware Gap is an exclusive jurisdiction like most of the older units of the National Park System in the west. In exclusive jurisdictions you have essentially a "Federal island" where the National Park Service not only has jurisdiction of natural resource law, but is the civil law enforcement agency for those lands where state and local agencies have no jurisdiction. Crime is high enough in one of these "islands", Yosemite National Park, to warrent a full time federal magistrate and 24 hour staffing for a jail. The Park Rangers at Yosemite have more exposure to officer safety issues and a higher workload than a lot of county sheriffs deputies in the west.
Most of the remainder of the National Park units are concurrent jurisdictions where the Feds or State and local agencies can have jurisdiction. In these cases National Park Service (NPS) rangers can use Federal law for all kinds of civil crimes and the state and local officers can use state law as well. A good example near where I live is Death Valley National Park where the CHP and Inyo County Sheriffs deputies patrol the state highway within the park and Inyo County has a resident deputy stationed in the joint NPS, State DOT, and Inyo County work center/residence area near Furnace Creek. The deputy is mainly there because Furnace Creek is private land and there is Shoshone tribal land adjacent to it, both within the boundaries of the National Park and county authority is needed in both those situations. The park is 3.3 million acres in size and the county is not capable of patrolling the entire park for "crimes against persons" law purposes and cannot provide emergency medical services either, so the arrangement is for the NPS to provide all of the EMS services, and is first responder on a lot of state and local law situations.
The same is true for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the latter being a relatively unknown agency in the east. The law enforcement officers on the Angeles National Forest in southern California often handle quite a bit of civil law enforcement under state law because of the long response times by L.A. County Sheriff deputies. The phrase among Angeles employees is that if all the dead bodies on the Forest rose from the dead it would increase the population of Los Angeles County by 10%, as this island of wildland in a sea of development is all to often the site of murders or the place murderers dispose of their deeds.
All law enforcement officers of the four public land management agencies in the Federal government (USFS, BLM, NPS, and the USFWS or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who have the fewest employees per acre of any of these agencies) attend the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glyncoe, Georgia. FLETC graduates are POST certified officers who have the authority to enforce state law depending on local circumstances and agreements and often, at least in the west, back up state and local officers and participate in interagency law enforcement responses within incorporated cities in areas where public land is close by. For the most part this is in predominately rural areas. The number of visits and law enforcement contacts made by these agencies is higher than the totals of many states combined. I don't have the current count, but it is in the hundreds of millions. The USFS Ranger District I retired from handles over four million visits per year.
I was not a full range law enforcement officer and did not carry defensive equipment (gun, stick, nasty aerosol spray, and silver bracelets) but did have law enforcement duties having to do with natural resources and use of National Forest land. I was often involved in disputes over campsites, entry violations (areas closed or restricted for safety purposes or for resource management reasons), wildlife (I had full authority to enforce state fish and game code), parking and traffic enforcement and direction, and often was first on scene of state crimes, traffic accidents, search and rescue, shootings, drunk drivers, and suicides. As an unarmed officer (called Forest Protection Officers or FPO's as opposed to LEO's) officer safety issues were critical and having radio communications was essential. In areas and periods of very high occupancy (1500-2000 visitors on 5 acres of land) where I was the only officer and my backup was 20 minutes or more away, I carried a shovel, not only to do routine trail maintenance as I patrolled but as a type of baton "just in case". The handle of a shovel can make a great defensive weapon in a pinch and being longer than a baton can, in limited circumstances, be more effective. I never had to use it to strike anyone but had to display it a couple of times to keep belligarant people from invading my space. As a field supervisor I averaged 4,000 contacts per year of which 800 or so were law enforcement related and this 800 didn't count the domestic disputes, missing person, theft and burglery, suicides, accidents, and fires (some arson) that I would often be the first officer of any kind to happen upon. None of this is the stuff of large urban areas with bank robberies, gang warfare, and murder/mayhem which many scanner listeners listen to, but it isn't nonsense either. Just supervising my employees, protecting them from highly emotional people behaving inappropriatly (code Adam Henry's), and keeping the toilets flushed, the water systems on, the bears protected from humans, the doors opening and closing, the shuttle busses running up and down the road, the entrance stations staffed, the fees collected, the pavement repaired, the buildings painted, the graffeti removed, the traffic flowing without gridlock, the fires extinquished, keeping people from destroying the resources, the trees from falling on people, and on and on kept me on the radio a lot, not to mention doing a high level of multi-tasking every moment of every day yearlong. For some of the law enforcement, especially in the winter when I was often the only employee in the field on several hundred thousand acres, I would have loved to been able to encrypt on occasion. In some areas I would pull up to several unoccupied cars and find one of more of them with a scanner on manual with our frequency displayed for everyone to see. This gives you somewhat of an uncomfortable feeling when you see it, considering it usually happened in problem prone areas.
During my career in three different states I was often 5, 10, 30, and sometimes up to 45 miles distant from the nearest person for 1-8 days at a time. No, I don't mean the nearest backup or fellow employee, I mean the nearest human being. Sometimes I would drop into radio dead areas for several hours or up to 2 days, both on foot and in a vehicle. That mobile or handheld was essential and routine check-ins could have been the only way they could find my body. I flew air patrol on dozens of occasions and in the great outdoors away from the big city you don't check in with the air traffic controlers at our low altitudes, but flight followed with the dispatch center. None of what I have mentioned even touches the dozen or so wildland fires I arrived first on scene for, with the closest second in units being 30-60 minutes away. I'm not including the single tree or 1/4 acre lightning strike fires with little immediate potential, but those that can make a person excited enough that the phrase "they sound like they are chewing on the microphone" applied to me when I first started and applied to even people with more than 20 years under their belt.
Try to imagine a 2 acre fire in heavy brush with 80 foot trees torching or crowning on the uphill side of the fire with an uphill wind and you just arrived alone with your Type 7 wildland patrol engine (50 - 200 gallons of water, pump rated at 10-29 gallons per minute at 100 PSI, and 200 feet of hose) and you are told the nearest air tanker is half of the state of Arizona away, and it will arrive sooner than many of the ground forces enroute. Imagine a 3 year old child missing from the banks of a springtime swollen creek and the next unit in is at least 10 minutes away and you can't hear your radio due to the child's mother screaming in your ear. 10 minutes that become like eternity. Imagine 8 large and full campgrounds, nearly 1000 vehicles, and Lord knows how many people in a narrow and heavily forested valley with a fire showing extreme fire behavior downcanyon with 35 mile per hour upcanyon winds and the only road out being a 18 foot wide paved road which has to go uphill 1500 feet in elevation. That fire having consumed 6,000 acres of upper elevation 100 foot tall mixed species conifers in a few hours. Now imagine being in charge of 10 people who got to evacuate this valley after you spent an entire night on that fire when it was only 500 acres with 38 people who walked in 8 miles to only begin to attempt stopping it. That fire having chewed up that 8 miles the next afternoon. I don't have to imagine any of these things.
In the southwestern U.S. public land units such as Organ Pipe National Monument, Big Bend National Park, the Coronado National Forest, BLM administered public lands, as well as a few National Wildlife Refuges are right on the Mexican border. Officer safety there is critical for land managment law enforcement officers as well as FPO's, and other agency personnel. Smuggling of drugs, aliens, and anything else you can think of is constant. The travel of illegals through the Cleveland and Coronado National Forests makes routine resource management work by biologists, foresters, botonists, hydrologists, engineers, and recreation management personnel, to just name a few, more risky than in other areas. Every employee of the USFS is required to check in and out when they go out in the field by radio with the dispatch center because of an incident 15 years or more ago, where an employee doing campground maintenance work was kidnapped, raped, and transported several hundred miles before being dumped on the side of a road after a couple of days of hell.
You see managing public lands and resources and providing outdoor recreation involves a lot of effort and hard work from a dwindling number of dedicated employees and people with enough dedication to start in the natural resource and outdoor recreation field in the first place. It is like the proverbial duck where everything looks placid on the surface with all the work going on where you might not see it. For most of the population they can't recognize a natural resource problem or even a crisis if it bit them in the nose. This is not an arrogant statement as land management is very complex and even with a keen interest in it starting in high school it took me many years after college to really grasp what it is all about.
Since I retired the post 9/11 atmosphere for full range law enforcement officers has changed. I'm seeing additional antennas on their vehicles and my former co-workers are evasive about what they are for. I know that some NPS and USFS law enforcement officers were involved during the 1992 L.A. riots and having them involved in homeland security task forces and such is a good guess as to what the antennas might are for.
As of 1/1/05 all federal agencies were required to convert to narrowband which is a 12.5 Khz spacing. They also were required to have digital capability. For routine communications the USFS is not using digital or encryption, at least locally. The narrowband stuff is more difficult to listen to as coverage of the repeaters has become more marginal making antenna and receiver sensitivity issues more critical. When radios are switched to digital, repeater coverage gets more marginal and the agencies, having already been required to replace every single radio in its inventory, cannot afford to add to the backbone system.
The point here being that "nonsense" is all in the eye of the beholder.
K5MAR
Member
Very informative post, Exsmokey! You've undoubtedly opened a lot of eyes, mine included, to difficulties of the NPS and it's associated agencies. Having worked in law enforcement myself, I had a little idea of the range of responsibilities your people face, but I hadn't really thought through all the ramifications in places like Yellowstone or Death Valley. I visited both back in the 60's, can't imagine what the crowds are like these days. Scary!
My hat's off to you guys and gals!
Mark S.
My hat's off to you guys and gals!
Mark S.
I do not think this is true. As of 1/1/05 all federal agencies were required to convert to narrowband but it can be analog or digital. Most have not meet the date. The Dept. of Interior (NPS, BLM, BIA) has selected P25 digital The Dept. of Agriculture (Forest Service) has chosen to stay analog for now.
Currently the National Interagency Incident Communications Division lists several radios as approved for fire use. All of them look to be capable of digital operation. Their website indicates that the Forest Service is currently using the DOI contract. Locally I've heard an FS law enforcement officer testing a radio in the digital mode. The handhelds my former co-workers are carrying are BK/Relm DPH radios which is a digital P25 radio. I do not know if the backbone system (repeaters and 400 MHz links) are digital capable.
I can't find the references I've seen but my understanding is all of the radios being used by the Forest Service are capable of P25 digital operation. The BK DPH programming instructions available on the internet certainly indicates that. I don't think the FS would purchase any radio which would not be approved for fire use whether the radio is being used by someone in fire management or not.
As for agencies not meeting the 1/1/05 deadline I can't comment as I don't have the opportunity to listen to Federal systems other than two Forest Service and two BLM systems and they sound like they have met the deadline.
I know my post was rather lengthy and unfortunately was written rather quickly and contains a number of errors in grammar, spelling, and composistion. I tried to cover the gist of a very complex profession with lots of activity. I could have elaborated more in stating my point. It is hard to state how most of the employees of natural resource and land management agencies are constantly juggling dozens of balls in the air at once. The public land systems in the U.S., which so many U.S. citizens choose to complain about and take for granted, is the envy of the world. The U.S. consistently runs a trade surplus in tourism and over my career I made it a point to ask foreign visitors why they come to the U.S. and they always include mention of National Parks, Forests, Widllife Refuges, or state parks as a large portion of why they are here. The National Forest system contributes $130 billion to the gross domestic product, 87% of which comes from recreation and wildlife uses. In the west 50% of the water supply is produced from National Forest land and in California more than half of the water supply comes from the National Forests, National Parks, and other public lands of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Since California is the number one agriculture state in the U.S. and produces half the fresh fruit and vegatables for the country, including many products grown nowhere else in the country, public lands are essential to the nation for food production. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power estimates that they are saving $2 billion by not having to build a large filtration plant because 75% of the water for the city comes from the Inyo National Forest where the watershed is relatively undisturbed. This does not include the annual operating and maintenance costs of such a plant. Almost every drop of water in the Colorado river, which supplies most of the southwestern U.S. and portions of Mexico with water comes from federal public land.
The U.S. Forest Service was the lead agency in the development of the Incident Command System (ICS) in the 1970's which was implemented by most emergency management agencies in the 1980's and 1990's nationwide. There are 16 national incident management teams (Type I) established by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, ID. These teams are interagency in makeup with USFS, BLM, USFS, USFWS, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA the fifth federal wildland fire agency), as well as National Weather Service, state, and local agency employees as members. There are also 35 or so Type II teams who handle incidents that are a little less complex and smaller in size. Then there are 4 Area Management Teams who are brought in when an incident or group of incidents becomes so large that several Type I and or Type II teams are involved.
These teams don't just manage wildland fires but a full range of disasters. Almost every hurricane has at least one of these teams managing large receiving and distribution centers at the reaquest of FEMA. The Forest Service was tasked with the recovery of the Columbia Shuttle debris and had several of these teams working along with Interregional Hotshot Crews and other fire crews doing the majority of the searching by grid that was done over a very large area for every piece of debris to be found. One of these national Type I team managed the logistical and planning functions for the World Trade Center 9/11 disaster with the operations function being handled by other agencies but integrated with into an ICS organization. Often wildland fire ICS organizations are brought in to manage disasters when state and local governments are overwhelmed by the size and nature of the situation. A good example was the Mt. St. Helens erruption of 1980.
The National Interagency Incident Communications radio cache is not only used for wildland fire but for many of the types of disasters I just mentioned as it has portable repeaters, remote links for command, tactical, and logistics functions as well as aviation, all with dedicated radio frequencies. I've heard reports that this cache for used for the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and was used in 2004 for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions as well as on disasters in foreign countries. The National Interagency Incident Communications Division of NIFC is a partnership effort between the U.S. Forest Service and the 4 wildland fire management agencies of the Department of Interior (NPS, BLM, USFWS, and BIA).
Lastly I would like to mention that land management agency personnel take many risks in the performance of their duties. The wildland fire risks are obvious or should be. The Storm King Mountain fire of 1994 involved 14 fatalities with Forest Service and BLM employees of a hotshot crew and a smokejumper crew and is a good example. The Storm King fire was being fought not because of high resource values but to protect a subdivision that probably should have never been built in a urban/wildland interface zone in the first place. There are risks in non-fire work also. Aircraft use for wildlife surveys, hazmat, being outdoors in conditions most people would choose not to be out in, foot and horseback travel in terrain most people stay away from, technical rock climbing rescue in places such as Mt. McKinley, the Grand Tetons, Half Dome and El Capitan, entering old mine workings to determine how to mitigate public hazards, driving in places and at times many people would stay completly away from, avalanche evaluation and the use of explosives and artillery for triggering them, blasting for trail maintenance, use of non-powered equipment for wilderness trail maintenance, and the list could go on. For me I had four near miss situations which would have been fatal except for a few inches or seconds. Three were aircraft related, two of these were fire related and the other related to snowpack and flood runoff recon, and the last was related to patrol on cross country skiis.
Law enforcement and public contact work in the field in the natural resource management is inherently dangerous because their is a higher percentage of contacts with firearms present, alcohol use tends to be high, and response times for backup are much higher than in an urban setting. The assualt rate for game wardens is among the highest, if not the highest, for law enforcement officers. A park ranger was gunned down with an assualt weapon 3-4 years ago in Organ Pipe National Monument by a smuggler who was essentially surrounded by additional officers anyway and was himself killed shortly after killing the park ranger.
I've lost four close co-workers as well as a cousin cousin to fire, avalanche control, and rescue work. Those who think the radio communications of these agencies is nonsense should realize what these employees are doing for them.
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