California officials report progress in their battle against wildfires, even as new dangers arise from powerful winds, reported NPR. In the southern half of the state, a new brush fire burned 1,300 acres in less than five hours in the Simi Valley area on Wednesday, according to CalFire. High winds threaten to increase the flames through Thursday evening.
At the request of the Department of Homeland Security, the FCC added five more California counties to its Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS). The system now includes information for these counties: Alpine, Alameda, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Glenn, Humboldt, Kern, Lake, Los Angeles, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, Tuolumne, Ventura, Yolo, and Yuba.
Overall, the percentage of cell site outages due to power cuts from Pacific, Gas & Electric remains steady at 476 sites out of 26,120, or 1.8 percent, according to DIRS.
351 had no power, 83 were out because of transport issues and 24 were damaged. That compares to Monday’s figures when 378 had no power, 37 were out because of transport issues and 36 were damaged.
Marin County has had the most outages since the FCC began keeping track, dropped to 14 cell sites outages on Wednesday; that compares to 95 on Tuesday. Now Orange County has the highest number of site outages at 133, compared to four on Tuesday.
There’s been no change to 911 call centers. 911 calls to Fairfax Police Department, CA have been rerouted to another Public Safety Answering Point. Cable and wireline subscribers without services continued to drop, at 173,058 on Wednesday (down from 223,973 on Tuesday.)
No television stations reported being off the air. Thirteen FM stations were off-air; That’s down from 21 on Tuesday. Three others are off-air and sent their programming to other stations.
Only one AM reported being off-air on Wednesday; that compares to three on Tuesday.
October 31, 2019
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