See video here: https://losalamos.granicus.com/player/clip/4943?meta_id=331852

BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

Los Alamos County Councilors heard in great detail Oct. 6 from Emergency Management staff about what happened as a result of a fiber cut at 1:38 p.m. September 24 in the Old Buckman Area in Santa Fe County near the Rio Grande. A third party road grader reportedly struck the fiber in an active road construction site in the area.

Among extensive information presented by EM. was a list of lessons learned from the incident, which included the following:

Createing a checklist for County employees to use during such an incident; Creating a Microsoft Teams channel for coordination and communication; Continue to look for opportunities to build capacity and redundancy in EM systems; Encourage folks to set their cell phones for WiFi during incidents; and talk to managers across the County at facilities that community members will be directed to during an outage.

Presenters were  County Broadband Manager Jerry Smith, Deputy Emergency Manager Cody Ulrich and Emergency Communications Manager Kate Stoddard. The slides presented to Council may be viewed in the video link above, and contain as much technical information on the broadband situation in the County as is currently available. EM staff recommends that members of the community acquire a Srarlink system or back-up internet for use when there is a network outage.

For more information on Emergency Management, including how to sign up for emergency notifications, go to Emergency Management’s website.