The Offline Report

Here's a news story from Dec. 13th this reader only discovered in the paper edition. The SF Chronicle home page is lovely, but it's difficult to discern which stories are from today's paper, yesterday's paper, or last month's paper. In the paper edition AND the e-edition, however, the reader can flip through that day's edition and scan headlines of every story in every section. The story titled " 911 call logs reveal terrifying moments at onset of Camp Fire " covers both which residents received evacuation calls from regional authorities, and which residents placed calls. Particularly heart-breaking is the story of one 11-year-old who called 9-1-1 and remains unaccounted for. "Hundreds of calls rolled in throughout the day" the story says. "In Magalia, an 11-year-old child had stayed home from school, and her parents couldn’t get home to get her out." Evacuation call procedures, and their failures, have been covered by othe...

In the last decade digital technology has pushed analog off the cliff, and we're still tying up the loose ends from the severed analog connections. People over a certain age (40) remember analog telephones never needed a battery or any kind of power adapter. Among the half of households still using landlines these days, few of them realize their home lines won't work when the power is out, regardless of what kind of phone they have, because the underlying analog telephone networks have been replaced with digital networks . In 2018 KQED combed through 9-1-1 logs to identify some evacuation communications failures from 2017's fires , many of which have been fixed since their report. The L.A. Times this week reported more communications and alert failures in this article: Camp fire evacuations failed to reach more than a third of residents meant to receive calls . The L.A. Times also reported more state legislature calls to action toward closing the feedback loop in this ar...

Carole Masson, 68, one who successfully evacuated the Paradise, CA, town recently leveled by wildfire, told the SFWeekly that landlines in the area have been converted from analog to digital. A Harvard Business Review in 2014 reported the FCC was coordinating the replacement of analog telephone networks with digital ones . Analog phone networks worked when the power was out. Apparently digital phone networks don't: The main problem with the Camp Fire, she says, is that PG&E warned people they were going to turn off the power in the days leading up to it. When it did go out, it was because the fire blew out the transformers and knocked down power lines, but many residents thought it was simply their energy company taking precautions. As landlines are digital now, the minute the power goes down so do the house phones, destroying communication for those who don’t own cell phones. “We need either some kind of a landline system with remotes in people’s houses, because if they d...