One of the bigger shocks of the Redwood Complex Fire was the collapse of both landline and cell phone service and internet in Willits and other areas distant from the fire zone.
On Mendocino Works on Wednesday 15 November at 7 p.m., we investigated what caused these cascading outages, asked what you can do to prepare for the next disaster, and exploreed what local firms are doing to improve telecoms in a rural region that the big companies prefer to ignore.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE FULL BROADCAST
Three guests joined the conversation:
- Trish Steel, chairman of the Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County, who shared preliminary results of a four-county survey she organized to measure fire-related telecom performance,
- Jacob Turner, operations manager of Seakay Internet, who inspected damaged telecommunications infrastructure during and after the fires,
- Sage Statham, general manager of Mendocino Community Network, a locally owned Internet service provider that recently began rolling out telephone service in Mendocino and Fort Bragg.
Click this link if you'd like to take the Broadband Alliance survey, which will be live through the end of November. It's your chance to let authorities know how well telephone, cell phone and Internet service worked for you during the fires.
Mendocino Works was hosted and engineered by KZYX General Manager Jeffrey Parker.
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