2027 Agenda

Oregon's 2026 wildfire season reinforced a critical lesson for public-safety communications: radio, cellular, fiber, 911, satellite, microwave, and commercial power cannot be managed as independent systems. During multiple incidents, wildfires threatened communications sites and transport infrastructure supporting several services at once, creating cascading risks that were not always obvious at the start of the incident.

This session uses real operational case studies from Oregon to examine how emergency management and communications personnel developed situational awareness around threatened infrastructure, identified hidden dependencies, coordinated with public and private-sector partners, and built alternate communications paths before failures occurred.

This talk discusses cases including wildfire threats to rural fiber and public-safety connectivity, mountaintop communications sites affected by fire and power-loss concerns, and a multi-carrier 911 disruption where provider restoration notifications did not initially match operational testing at the PSAP.

See how communications infrastructure can be treated as a single interconnected lifeline rather than a collection of separate technologies. The session will focus on practical methods for identifying infrastructure owners and users, evaluating backup power and alternate paths, coordinating with carriers and government partners, and validating that restored service is actually usable by responders and the public.