November 24, 2022
AT&T is sending a representative to attend the Sierra County Board of Supervisors Dec. 20 meeting about ongoing service breakdowns by the telecommunications giant that affect public safety in the county. At the top of the list of county concerns: Sierra County Sheriff’s Office radio communications being offline for a week earlier this month following an early season snowstorm, requiring use of a backup system. “AT&T needs to be held accountable for their maintenance program,” said Tim Beals, Sierra County Director of Public Works, Roads and Transportation—citing threats to 911 calling and the county’s “fragile emergency communications system. We’re pretty isolated and don’t have other options.” Inadequate maintenance by AT&T of lines and infrastructure in Sierra County is a recurring problem. Complaints reached a crescendo last year when extended telephone and cable/Internet outages over the Memorial Day weekend in Sierra City wreaked havoc for businesses and residents, and made making a 911 call impossible. County officials called for urgent corrective action then by AT&T. A series of investigative articles by The Mountain Messenger (June 3, July 1, and July 22, 2021) revealed the alarming news that AT&T lines between Downieville and Sierra City had lain strewn along the ground for the past three years. The Messenger contacted the California Public Utilities Commission that regulates private utilities like AT&T and provided the CPUC photos of the lines that had been brought down by a winter storm in 2017-18 and never adequately repaired. Nearly two months after the Memorial Day 2021 outages, AT&T finally replaced those downed lines and placed them on poles. But history appears to be repeating itself: In a Nov. 18 email to county officials, Sheriff Fisher noted that the enormous December 2021 Christmas-week snow storm damaged the AT&T lines that carry Sheriff Office communications. Although a temporary fix of the lines was done last winter, “it’s my understanding that come spring and summer, [the lines were] just left on the ground and no additional work was done to restring the lines on the poles.” Consequently, during the snowstorm early this month, sheriff radios went down for almost a week, requiring the office to rely on a secondary, fallback system. Because of the county’s landscape of mountains and canyons, the Sheriff Office’s radio dispatch system relies heavily on AT&T phone lines for internal communications and to respond to emergencies. Radio transmissions are funneled from the Ruby Bluff repeater to the Cal-Ida repeater—and then sent via AT&T phone lines to Indian Valley, ultimately reaching the Sheriff’s Office in Downieville. In his email to the county, Sheriff Fisher proposed these solutions: “Bottomline, I would like to see AT&T install a permanent generator at the copper to fiber transfer box so we don’t have to have one brought out [multiple] times a year— [and have] AT&T harden the phone line that runs from Indian Valley to the Cal-Ida repeater, or at least get it off the ground and back on the poles.” Fisher told The Messenger on Monday that while local AT&T crews are “great and very responsive,” temporary fixes cannot be a replacement for permanent, corrective measures. He noted that the Sheriff’s Office radio system not only carries dispatch calls, but also communications for Sierra County Probation and the Sierra Valley and Loyalton Fire Departments. Scheduled to attend the Dec. 20 Sierra County Board of Supervisors meeting on behalf of AT&T—either in person or virtually via Zoom—is the company’s Sacramento Director of External Affairs Bryant Milesi. In an email to AT&T, Beals said additional issues may be raised at the meeting—including an update on the Downieville AT&T tower and plans for any additional towers in the county; Internet/broadband access; continuing issues with maintaining consistent phone service in the Alleghany-Pike area; and the “loss of ‘copper lines’ when [AT&T Internet/phone] U-verse is installed at private homes thus making communication during power outages impossible.”