Wildfires Are Burning Up Cell Towers and Leaving Responders in the Dark
More than an inconvenience, these lost connections can be life-threatening
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On August 20, environmental photographer Stuart Palley set out for Guerneville, a small town in Northern California’s Sonoma County that was facing an existential threat: The Walbridge Fire, sparked by lightning, had exploded across the rugged hills to the north. For Palley, it was a standard assignment. He was to spend several days shadowing a team of firefighters in order to document the inferno up close.
There was just one problem. As soon as Palley arrived in Guerneville, his cellphone lost service. It would remain out for the next two days while he was in town, making what was already a tough job even tougher. Palley wasn’t able to send updates to his editor during the day or tweet information on the fire. On his first day there, he had no way of getting in touch with the fire battalion chief he was supposed to meet up with.
“I literally had to drive around and ask people where he was, and go hunt him down,” Palley told Future Human. “I was completely in the dark.”
Being in the dark, communications-wise, is something of an occupational hazard for Palley, who has been photographing wildfires professionally for nearly a decade. Once or twice a year, he finds himself working in an area where mobile networks have gone dead due to a power outage or fire-damaged infrastructure. With more wildfires spreading into urban areas packed with cell towers, power lines, and cables transmitting data, the outages, he says, have gotten worse in recent years. Unfortunately, the fires causing them are expected to become even more frequent and severe in the future.
Palley’s not the only one who has noticed. With millions of Americans now relying exclusively on their cellphones to make 911 calls, receive emergency alerts, and stay connected during disasters wireless carriers and emergency managers on the front lines of the West’s burgeoning fire crisis are discovering that cellular infrastructure is alarmingly vulnerable. This vulnerability is most visible in California, where the state estimates that wildfires and the “public safety power shutoff” (PSPS) events intended to prevent them impacted…
