Monday, May 19, 2008
By KIMBERLY TRONE
The Press-Enterprise
With another fire season bearing down on Southern California, the national system used to order additional firefighters and equipment during a fire siege is not meeting the needs of California, its largest user.
Cal Fire Director Ruben Grijalva said delays in the automated dispatching system known as ROSS made it difficult to know where firefighters and equipment were deployed in October when 23 wildland fires simultaneously blazed across Southern California, including the mountain communities of San Bernardino County.
Local fire bosses, frustrated by frequent hardware glitches and delays in the federal Resource Ordering and Status System, began bypassing ROSS and making direct requests for firefighters and equipment from other agencies, Grijalva said.
It sometimes took up to 12 hours for deployments to get conveyed to fire commanders, and the confusion complicated efforts on the ground, Grijalva said.
"At command and control you would think they were in Orange County and they were in San Diego County," said Grijalva, who has begun meeting with federal lawmakers to share his concerns.
Federal officials say they are working to identify shortcomings and solutions in ROSS, which tracks and dispatches the closest available firefighters and equipment when local units are overwhelmed.
But a report from a wildland safety organization after the October firestorm said users of ROSS complained that it "doesn't seem to be designed to handle the high capacity of orders for events like this."
After two years of using ROSS, Cal Fire officials said that if problems aren't fixed soon, they will be forced to phase out of the system and build a new network that serves the fire-prone state.
"My concern is that after two years it is not serving California," Grijalva said.
The National Wildland Coordinating Group, a panel of federal agencies that oversees ROSS, has been using the system for about a decade.
It is used by about 400 regional emergency operations and dispatch centers across the country. ROSS replaced the manual pencil-and-paper ordering system used by many agencies just a few decades ago and tracks costs as they are incurred. Since its inception, the Internet-based system has cost taxpayers about $69 million.
Federal fire officials pressed Cal Fire to transition to ROSS to create a seamless national program for delivering personnel and equipment more swiftly to large-scale events, Grijalva said.
Federal lawmakers say they are keeping an eye on the issues with ROSS to give the Forest Service, which uses ROSS nationwide, and Cal Fire time to broker a solution.
"We are aware of the problems with the ROSS system and share the concern that they be resolved quickly," said Nathan Britton, spokesman for Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. "We ... stand ready to assist if needed."
Critical Report
A report by the Arizona-based Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, a group that promotes safe and effective work practices in the wildland fire community, said during the October fires, ROSS "kept resources tied to an incident where they were no longer needed," was "slow at best" and "seemed incapable of responding fast enough to avoid dramatic delays in aircraft missions."
Some users "wondered if upgraded computers and a high speed internet connection would help alleviate some of the problems with ROSS," the report said.
The report also noted that California emergency workers had not been using the system as long and might require more training.
Tom Harbour, director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service, acknowledged that ROSS needs improvements.
"Since ROSS is a compilation of hardware, software, networks and people, it's hard for me to know just what the failing is," Harbour said.
He said his agency "lobbied Cal Fire very hard" to sign on to ROSS because it made sense for the large, combustible state to be part of a nationally integrated response system.
The backup for ROSS when it doesn't work as planned is the same as firefighting agencies used to do when additional help was needed, Harbour said:
"We pick up telephones, faxes, papers and pencils. We have contingencies that we implement so that we get the boots on the ground."
Frustrated By Delays
At the Southern California Geographic Area Coordination Center in downtown Riverside, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Julia Honer routinely uses ROSS to forward requests for firefighters and equipment.
The center on Mulberry Street houses several state and federal firefighting agencies and, during large-scale events, teams from across the country work from computers and dispatch centers to manage the firefighting efforts.
Honer said ROSS is tedious, with many data entry points and screens to sift through before an order is forwarded for processing.
During periods of high use, Honer said, dispatchers will have to stop what they're doing and restart ROSS because it freezes, causing frustrating delays when time is crucial.
Honer, a member of the California ROSS Implementation Team, said fire agencies in California represented 40 percent of its use in the first nine months after Cal Fire linked up.
"By adding California, it added a lot of usership to the system, a lot of burden," she said.
Detrimental in Emergency
Honer said mechanical failures in ROSS could be detrimental to the way resources are dispatched in an emergency situation.
At the same time an engine crew was being overrun by fire and forced to shelter in place last summer in Owens Valley, northeast of Fresno, ROSS was slowly crashing, Honer said.
Although no one was injured in that incident, there is a high degree of frustration at those types of failures, even though contingency plans are in place, she said.
"When there is a firefighter entrapment, the tension gets pretty high. Everybody focuses on that. We need a program that is going to work all the time," she said.
"Sometimes systems work only as well as they are funded," Honer said.
Reach Kimberly Trone at 951-368-9456 or
ktrone@PE.com
