Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: lars@spectrum.cmc.com (Lars Poulsen) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Is Santa Barbara Completely Destroyed? Message-ID: <9451@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 3 Jul 90 20:04:14 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: Rockwell CMC Lines: 105 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 466, Message 7 of 7 In article <59846@bu.edu.bu.edu> telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) writes: >Word has been reaching us the past few days of the tragic fires >burning though parts of California, and the most disturbing news is >that apparently much of the town of Santa Barbara is in ashes. Perhaps >someone in the area could let us know what the effect has been on >telco service in that area, and other parts of the state. The reports .. have been much exaggerated. About 4000 acres of coastal foothill shrub burned, along with about 525 residences. The fire started at 18:02 PDT on Wednesday night; it is unclear whether it was deliberately set, or somebody just tossed a cigarette out their car window. The area has been suffering under a drought for about 4 years; water is severely rationed, and the city of Santa Barbara is checking out pricing for ferrying water down on ships from Canada. The chaparral was tinder dry and two days of 100-110 degree temperatures had brought it to a flash point. A "sundowner" wind condition (similar to a "Santa Ana") engulfed the hillside along highway 154 (San Marcos Pass road) in 40-foot high flames in minutes. The wind carried the flames downhill towards the city; within 40 minutes after it began near the top, it jumped across US-101 (the Camino Real freeway) near the county jail between Santa Barbara and Goleta, and a residential area where the railroad crosses "main street" went up in a firestorm; I heard the gas lines exploding from my house a half mile away. Throughout the evening, many neighbourhoods were evacuated. The fear was that the fire would burn out the Hope Ranch neighbourhood, a two-acre ranchette subdivision from the 1950's; but shortly before midnight the wind died down, and the fire stopped spreading. For the next several days, the hillside kept burning (I believe it was finally declared "controlled" this morning). Thursday night, there was some fear that another sundowner wind might drive the fire down towards the city through a different canyon. But the wind was much less severe, and actually drove the fire back to the already burned-over area. Thursday night around 9PM the wind died down, and we all breathed easier. --------------------- TELECOM RELATED STUFF --------------------- The E911 response center was located in the county complex in the fire zone, and had to be evacuated early on, along with the fire command post. This created a severe logistic problem, but fortunately, there were backup sites for both: The city had a command post downtown, and the county had a backup command post downtown. The GTD-5 system was heavily loaded; at one point, the dial tone delay was almost 30 seconds. The system went short on intercity trunks, but apparently the software can allocate the available trunks on a priority basis to the class-A emergency lines. My wife was in Texas, and I tried several times to reach her, alternating between MCI and ATT; mostly ATT worked better. (Probably due to ATT giving priority to OUTGOING calls). The telephone switch never failed, and service has not been disrupted since the fire. Our local college station is a training ground for Rock'n'Roll DJs, and has no useful news staff. Our "local" NPR affiliate is a repeater for the San Luis Obispo station, and our local APR affiliate is a repeater for KUSC, a classical station in Los Angeles. But one of the commercial stations hooked their AM ("talk radio") and FM ("adult album") transmitters together, and went live-all-news without commercials for 27 hours. On the second day they started a pledge drive for a relief fund and raised $80,000 before the sun went down. The local television station also suspended regular programming, but did not have quite as good information during the critical hours. (When the fire zone partitioned the town, and one reporter could not get back to the studio, he drove 40 miles away to Santa Maria to get an uplink, and I don't think he ever got back on the fire line). I am very impressed with the way GTE handled this disaster. This area may not be typical, but we really have had outstanding service since the GTD-5 system was installed four or five years ago. Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer CMC Rockwell lars@CMC.COM [Moderator's Note: Your mention of the need to evacuate the emergency response center and fire command post itself was interesting, and brings to mind the fire here in Chicago, October, 1871. The Western Union agent on duty downtown that Sunday night stuck around the office until is was apparent the building was going to be on fire soon. In an interview in the {Chicago Tribune} in 1901, he remarked on the bell in the steeple of City Hall. The City Hall Fire Alarm Office had an operator on duty at all times to ring the bell alerting residents to a fire. The bell was actually operated by a mechanical device, and the setting of the gears detirmined the cadence of the bell, which in turn gave a coded reference to the fire location. Four rings (pause) was a general alarm. Long after most of City Hall had burned to the ground and the fire alarm operator had fled in terror, with the streets in the area deserted, that bell continued to sound. The Western Union guy said it was 'the eeriest thing I had ever encountered ... the bell tolling with no one to listen or heed it ... and finally the steeple itself caught (fire) and the bell crashed to the ground with a monstrous clang ... '. PT]