Someone has waved the "nasty stick" at the Los Padres in the last three years! The fire management people on that Forest have to be feeling a little beleaguered. First the Day Fire two years ago, then last year the Zaca Fire, and now the Indians, Basin Complex, and Gap Fires. I know from personal experience what a huge workload it is to have a major fire on the Ranger District you work on. It is not so much the firefighting itself, but all the administration that begins once the suppression forces are demobilized. Burned area rehabilitation, public information, closures for public safety, trail rehab, recreation site reconstruction, watershed effects, road maintenance, the list goes on. I worked through a major fire on the Mammoth Ranger District back in 1992 and after about 10-12 weeks of long days that resulted from all of those jobs, I took one of the best vacations in my life. There are far fewer employees in the agency to handle such things in today's Forest Service so the workload is beyond what I can imagine.
I would love to pick up an Incident Action Plan from each fire in California right now. No doubt there would be some interesting information on the Comm plan portion of them. So many new frequencies popping up!
I have two banks (as in the older scanners I have), and three scan lists (as in PSR-600) in my scanners programmed for the frequencies used on large incidents. There is one bank or list with all the CDF tacticals, commands, and aviation frequencies, and one bank or list with all the NIFC frequencies, and finally in my PSR-600's I have one list with all the "Federal Interoperability Channels." Some of the latter have been showing up on large fires and being used for commands and tacticals. Use is somewhat limited right now because the Interoperability Channels are all narrow band, thus limiting their use when state and local forces are assigned to incidents. The closer we get to the state/local narrow band deadline in 2013, the greater the use of these frequencies will be.
Hopefully, someone can park their scanner on search during this latest large fire and report back the findings. That is the only way we are going to figure out if any new frequencies have been assigned for incident use. Access to official information has all but dried up due to homeland security concerns.
