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A local broadband company supplies important communication links for helicopters fighting a devastating summer Arizona wildfire.
August 26, 2005
By Julia Bailey
Like many Western states, Arizona faces potentially catastrophic wildfire season each year. Extremely hot summer temperatures and thousands of lightning strikes are aggravated further by droughts, the bark beetle (which has destroyed more than 800,000 acres of Arizona forests), and thousands of desert campers who bring cigarettes, campfires and fireworks into the mountains.
This year, following an unusually wet winter and early spring, Arizona experienced relief from years of drought, as well as extensive new growth of grasses and brush across the Sonoran Desert. Yet, early summer brought scorching heat, which turned this expansive swath of dry vegetation into fuel that fed the second-largest wildfire in Arizona history.
Fighting Fire from the Air
The Cave Creek Complex Fire, as it has come to be called, began on June 21, 2005, when two lightning strikes sparked fires near Cave Creek, Ariz., approximately 30 miles northeast of Phoenix. The fires—which quickly combined and threatened homes, a major power grid riparian areas, and endangered species—quickly shot up steep, rugged terrain into the remote, rocky areas of Tonto National Forest. As it moved into many areas that were inaccessible to firefighters on the ground, fire managers called on every tool at their disposal to stop the fire's spread, deploying hotshot crews along the fire's flank and routing helicopters and airplanes to dump water and fire retardant in an effort to contain the fire.
Rapid Response
U.S. Forest Service mobile firefighting crews, which regularly move across the western United States to fight remote area fires, played an important role in the Cave Creek firefighting efforts. Heliponents, a helicopter service facility that operates out of a 40,000-square-foot hangar at Falcon Field Airport in Mesa, Arizona, was one of the helicopter companies called on to support the USFS crews. Heliponents is a customer of Last Mile Communications, which provides high-speed Internet access under its Wydebeam Broadband name.
The U.S. Forest Service operates a mobile flight control tower that rises from a semi-trailer, which moves from airport to airport, where it can be set up close to firefighting operations.
The mobile crews needed a T1 connection and voice-over-Internet (VoIP) phone service to aid them in doing their job. The USFS uses its Internet connection to track helicopter locations through GPS and to monitor changing weather conditions through satellite imaging technology.
Jeff Balda, Last Mile's operations manager, responded quickly to the call for help and worked in conjunction with WydeBeam to provide the necessary connectivity.
"We got the call at 3:30 Wednesday afternoon and had a VoIP phone and T1 bandwidth up and running by 6:30," says Pat Millette, WydeBeam's business manager. For the Cave Creek Complex fire, Last Mile installed a Motorola Canopy™ 5.7 wireless access module atop the mobile flight tower, where it transmitted data through the air to and from the tower antenna and the location where Last Mile collocates to fiber in downtown Mesa.
Critical support
When all was said and done, the helicopter crews from the USFS supplied much-needed support for the Cave Creek firefighting operation—carrying hundreds of gallons of water and retardant to extinguish hot spots and providing valuable mechanical assistance. "They are another tool in the wildland fire work. They can make or break some situations," said Chris Papen, spokesman for one of the command teams on the northern flanks of the fire.
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WYDEBEAM BROADBAND
1333 West Broadway Rd.
Mesa, Az 85202
PHONE:
(480) 964-4749 ext.1
EMAIL:
sales@wydebeam.com
support@wydebeam.com
Please Contact Us Today For More Information.
Request A Callback Here
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