A new niche for wildfire contractors?
We ran across an ad for a company in San Diego that specializes in providing wildland fire engines for private companies doing business in areas where vegetation fires can be a problem. According to Capstone Fire Management’s web page, they provide fire protection services to “Energy & Communication Infrastructure Companies, Road Construction and Transportation Companies, Environmental Infrastructure Companies, ‘Rights of Way’ Vegetation Management Companies and the Entertainment & Insurance Industries”.
Their “Fire Chief” is Jeff Meston, the retired Chief of the Novato Fire Protection District north of San Francisco. Novato tragically lost one of their firefighters, Captain Steve Rucker, when a firefighter from another unit set an unauthorized backfire on the Cedar fire east of San Diego in 2003.
Ham radio operator sentenced for jamming fire and police frequencies
An amateur radio operator was sentenced on October 8 for jamming fire and police radio frequencies and making threats to police and firefighters during a brush fire and other incidents near Hemet, California. Here is an excerpt from Southgatear.org:
On Friday, October 8th, twenty-nine year old Irene Levy, KJ6CEY, pleaded guilty to seven charges involving interference to the Hemet California police and the Riverside County Fire Department. A judge in the city of Murrieta sentenced her to three years probation and gave her credit for the time she spent in jail since her arrest last spring. She was also ordered to undergo psychiatric care.
As previously reported on Amateur Radio Newsline, last May 3rd police closed in on KJ6CEY just seconds after she made a final transmission on a Hemet police frequency using a commercial H-T. Investigators from the Hemet Police Department as well as Cal Fire said that the unauthorized, random transmissions were made from Levy’s mobile home in San Jacinto. Her radio transmissions, which included bomb threats, were monitored on frequencies used by the Hemet police and the Riverside County Fire Department and that they went beyond nuisance calls.
At that time, Hemet Police Sargent Mark Richards was quoted by The Press-Enterprise newspaper in Riverside as saying Levy disguised her voice as a man and made references to the deaths of police and firefighters and made bomb threats. He said some of the transmissions came during a Cal Fire search and rescue call, a major traffic accident, and a brush fire.
Richards report stated the transmissions began May 1st and ended in the early morning hours of May 3rd. He said in the report that direction-finding equipment helped locate Levy, who in one of her transmissions on May 2 suggested “police would never find her.”
Missing cat comes home a month after wildfire
During the 10,000-acre Canyon fire near Bakersfield, California, a couple’s cat disappeared, and after a month was assumed dead. But it returned, a little the worse for wear, but alive. KATU has the story.
