EDITOR:
Kudos to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, Douglas County Emergency Management and Communications, East Fork Fire Protection District, Carson City Sheriff, NHP and other agencies I may not know about in regard to the actions taken to protect all county citizens on Dec. 8 during the massive loss of most telephone communications.
I work within the county 911 Dispatch Center building; however am not a county employee nor do I have anything to do with dispatch. I routinely monitor county radio communications on scanners in my vehicles and at home. While en route to my job that morning, I became aware of this emergency. It quickly became very apparent that our county had a plan to deal with an emergency of this magnitude; almost all available deputies, both on and off-duty, were quickly mobilized to physically cover critical elements of the county infrastructure, including the schools, major commercial and other sites via their radio communications with the dispatch center and each other. The same held true for fire and paramedic agencies. The net result was that the entire county remained protected the whole time, and as far as I know, no major problems occurred during the outage as a result. Fortunately, Frontier Communications was able to restore fiberoptic-interconnected telephone service within a few hours, returning almost all of us to the expected status quo.
The next time you have a chance, thank a deputy, firefighter, paramedic, emergency management worker or NHP officer for your safety. I know I will.
John Campbell
Programming Manager, Douglas County Community Access TV (DCCATV) - ch216 (Valley) / ch19 (Lake)
Minden
