[grc] California suffered widespread cellphone outages during fires.

[Brian Shiratsuki]

By LEILA MILLER, RONG-GONG LIN II
NOV. 5, 2019 8:03 AM

When Ted Atz, a 75-year-old retiree in Marin County, learned that his
power would go out during the Kincade fire, he texted his loved ones
that he might lose cell service.

He was right. For four long days, Atz couldn’t make or receive calls.
He’d drive around his hometown of San Anselmo, hoping to find better
reception. He had no luck and was frustrated by the knowledge that if
he suffered some kind of medical or other emergency, he couldn’t reach
911.

“I would have liked to let family know that I was OK,” Atz said...

...People who couldn’t track down loved ones during the Kincade fire
had to result to an old-school approach: the radio. Listeners called
into KBBF-FM (89.1), a multilingual radio station in Santa Rosa that
broadcast news in Spanish and indigenous languages, hoping for word
from families that had gone quiet during the outages.

Rafael Vazquez, a KBBF host, suggested listeners check in with the
county and update their status as safe in case their relatives were
looking for them.

“People would say, ‘I cannot get a hold of a sister, I don’t know
where my mom or my dad went, we were supposed to connect but now I’m
not able to connect with them,’” he said.

Sofia Olmedo, 32, had been keeping her sister-in-law updated on her
whereabouts as she fled the city of Windsor with her two children,
husband and other relatives. When they found refuge at a ranch in Napa
County, owned by her husband’s employer, Olmedo’s phone lost service.
She stopped receiving government emergency alerts.

“I felt sad and frustrated that I couldn’t call to tell her that I was
OK,” she said.

Her husband was eventually able to get in touch with her sister-in-law
using his phone, which operated under another carrier, and Olmedo used
a solar-powered radio to listen to news from KBBF about the fire...

<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-05/mass-cellphone-outages-during-blackouts-and-fires-are-a-grim-preview-of-life-after-a-major-earthquake>