Cal Fire Live Radio CDF streaming radio scanner

Air Attack: (122.925, 151.220, 151.295, and 151.310)

Santa Clara Ranger Unit (Contra Costa & Alameda Counties)

San Mateo - Santa Cruz Ranger Unit

Lake - Napa Ranger Unit (Sonoma & Yolo Counties)

Marin County Fire (low band comes in only sometimes)

Nevada - Yuba - Placer Ranger Unit

Amador - El Dorado Ranger Unit

Mendocino Ranger Unit

Butte Ranger Unit

CDF Command 1 and 2

Cal Fire Tacs and White 2

** During a fire only air attack, tac channel, and local net will stream **

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF, or CAL FIRE) is the State of California's agency responsible for the administration of the state's private and public forests. It is often referred to as The California Department of Forestry, which was the name of the department before the 1990s. In the 1970s and before, it was known as the California Division of Forestry. They also provide firefighting capability to prevent and extinguish wildfires in the state's forests. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is also the largest full service all risk fire department in the Western United States and operates more fire stations year round than do the New York (FDNY), Los Angeles (LAFD), and Chicago (CFD) fire departments combined.

CDF is a department of the California Resources Agency, a state cabinet-level department that also comprises the California Department of Parks and Recreation, California Department of Fish and Game, and the California Department of Water Resources. The Department or Forestry works with employees of California Conservation Corps for firefighting and vegetation management. CDF uses inmate labor of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assist with fire suppression and logistics. Programs to control wood boring insects and diseases of trees are under forestry programs managed by CDF. The vehicle fleet is managed from an office in Davis, California.[2] The Department's Director is Del Walters, who was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger February 1, 2009.

CDF operations can be viewed as fitting into two categories: Schedule A and Schedule "B". Schedule B is defined as Resources Agency/CDF-funded, it is the Wildland side of CAL FIRE (CDF). Schedule "A" activities include county fire departments run by CDF under contracts with county governments. From north to south, Butte, Tuolumne, Merced, San Luis Obispo, and Riverside counties are examples of county fire departments operated by CDF under contract. Another commonly-heard CDF term is SRA which refers to State Responsibility Area: lands or area for which CDF has the primary responsibility to manage the public safety during a fire incident.

Starting on January 24, 2007, CDF has changed its "informal" name to CAL FIRE. The purpose is to bring CDF's name in line with other state agencies such as Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) and Cal Boating (California Department of Boating and Waterways).

Firefighters employed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection are represented by CDF Firefighters[4], which represents 4,000 members within CDF Firefighters and is also associated with the California Professional Firefighters (CPF)[5] and the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF)[6].

Wildland
Firefighting
Wildfire · Bushfire
Wildfire suppression
National Interagency Fire Center
USFS · BLM
CALFIRE · CALFIRE Aviation
New South Wales Rural Fire Service · Country Fire Authority, Victoria · Country Fire Service, South Australia
Tactics & Equipment
Incident Command System
Aerial firefighting
Controlled burn
Firebreak · Fire trail
Fire lookout tower
Fire-retardant gel
Fire-fighting foam
Fire retardant · MAFFS
Helicopter bucket · Driptorch
Handcrew · Hotshots
Helitack · Smokejumper
Rappeller · Engine crew

The CDF website states: "The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection protects the people of California from fires, responds to emergencies, and protects and enhances forest, range, and watershed values providing social, economic, and environmental benefits to rural and urban citizens."

The most visible part of CDF operations is fire suppression. Operations are divided into 21 Operational Units, which geographically follow county lines. Each unit consists of the area of one to three counties. Operational Units are grouped under two regions: Coast-Cascade and Sierra-South.

The Office of the State Fire Marshal is part of CDF and oversees activities including fire prevention, regulation of fire safety, and pipeline safety. All gas cans sold in California, for example, must be approved by the Office of the State Fire Marshal and marked with the Office's seal.

CDF owns and operates its own fleet of air tankers, air tactical aircraft and helicopters, which are managed under the Aviation Management Program. Additional aviation resources are leased by the program.

A statewide CDF training academy is operated at Ione, east of Sacramento. The facility is contiguous to Mule Creek State Prison

Operational Units are organizations designed to address fire suppression over a geographic area. They vary widely in size and terrain.

For example, Lassen-Modoc Operational Unit encompasses two rural counties and consists of eight fire stations and 13 pieces of equipment. The unit shares an interagency emergency command center with federal agencies including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. An interagency center contributes to economies of scale, supports cooperation, and lends itself to a more seamless operation. The area has fragmented jurisdictions across a large rural area along the Nevada and Oregon state lines.

Riverside Operational Unit, by itself is one of the largest fire departments in the nation, with 95 fire stations and about 230 pieces of equipment. The Riverside Operational Unit operates the Riverside County Fire Department under contract as well operate eighteen city fire departments and one community services district fire department. Nine of these stations belong to the state, with rest owned by the respective local government enity. The unit operates its own emergency command center in Perris. Terrain served includes urban and suburban areas of the Inland Empire and communities in the metropolitan Palm Springs area. The area includes forested mountains, the Colorado River basin, the Mojave Desert and Interstate 10.

Northern Region-
* Mendocino Unit
* San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit
* Santa Clara Unit (Including Contra Costa, Alameda, & parts of San Joaquin, & Stanislaus Counties)
* Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit (Including Colusa, Yolo and Solano Counties)
* Humboldt-Del Norte Unit
* Nevada-Yuba-Placer Unit (Including Sutter & Sierra Counties)
* Lassen-Modoc Unit (Including Plumas County as of June 2008)
* Amador-El Dorado Unit (Including Sacramento & Alpine Counties)
* Shasta-Trinity Unit
* Siskiyou Unit
* Tehama-Glenn Unit
* Butte Unit

Southern Region-
* San Luis Obispo Unit
* San Diego Unit (Including Imperial County)
* San Bernardino Unit (Including Inyo & Mono Counties)
* Riverside Unit
* Fresno-Kings Unit
* Madera-Mariposa-Merced Unit
* San Benito-Monterey Unit
* Tulare Unit
* Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit (Including portions of San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Alpine counties)

The counties of Marin, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange are paid by Cal Fire to provide fire protection to state responsibility areas within those counties rather than Cal Fire providing direct fire protection, and are commonly known as the "Contract Counties".

Lawmakers in Sacramento have mandated that every Operational Unit develop and implement an annual fire management plan. The plan will develop cooperation and community programs to reduce damage from, and costs of, fires in California One metric used by fire suppression units is initial attack success: fires stopped by the initial resources, (equipment and people,) sent to the incident.

Apparatus

CAL FIRE uses various apparatus to accomplish their daily responses. Engines fall under two categories, either being state owned—mostly wildland, or city/county owned, which CAL FIRE operates under contract.

For the wildland portion, most engines are manufactured with West-mark or Westates bodies on an International chassis. Commonly seen models of wildland engines include the Model 5, 9, 14, and 15. CDF Models 24 and 25 were test-bed models, with only a few of each model fielded. The newest versions of these engines are CDF model 34 (4WD) and 35 (2WD), manufactured by Rosenbauer and Placer Fire Equipment. Model 34/35's are currently being fielded statewide. As of 2009 Model 35's have been discontinued and Model 34's from HME Apparatus are the new standard. Fact sheets on all of CAL FIRE's current-service Type 3 (wildland) engine models can be found on the CAL FIRE web site under Mobile Equipment.

Most type I and II engines that are operated under contract are Westates bodies on HME(formerly Hendrickson) 1871 Series chassis, the same configuration used by the California Office of Emergency Services (OES) engines that are distributed throughout the state.

CAL FIRE has contracted with 10 Tanker Air Carrier for three years' of exclusive use of their DC-10 "super tanker" known as Tanker 910, at a cost of $5 million per year.

Type-3 Wildland Engine, CDF Model 14

Type-3 Wildland Engine, CDF Model 5

Type-3 Wildland Engine, CDF Model 24

Type-1 Pierce Pumper, owned by the Cypress FPD -- operated by CDF under contract

Pierce Aerial Ladder (Truck), owned by Napa County -- operated by CDF under contract

Smeal Midship Pumper, owned by San Luis Obispo County -- operated by CDF under contract

Tanker 910

CDF "Super Huey", formerly an UH-1H, assigned to the Bieber Helitack crew, takes off

Telecom history circa 1970

As of the early 1970s, CDF systems used VHF "high band" (151 MHz repeater/159 MHz mobile) stand-alone repeaters on State of California communications sites. CDF was an early adopter of hand held radios but the radios did not perform to modern public safety system standards. The systems served their purpose but were not originally engineered for hand held coverage because of the enormous coverage areas, the difficult terrain, and the lack of infrastructure to support a complex system. Sites had commercial power but many lacked reliable telephone lines or microwave radio connectivity. In terms of geography, CDF served mostly rural areas and the radio repeater sites to cover these areas were located in remote wilderness. Voting was in its infancy and, in CDF repeater systems, was unheard-of. Users understood this and used radios in entrepreneurial ways. For example, if an engine arriving at a fire could not find a spot where they had a radio path to reach dispatch, they would call another engine that could communicate and ask the staff to relay their message. The unit might see if they could get through by switching to an alternate channel, such as State net, which had repeaters at different sites, and consequently, a different coverage area.

The smallest geographic division of CDF Fire is the Operational Unit. Examples of Operational Units are Lassen-Modoc Operational Unit and Tuolumne-Calaveras Operational Unit. Operational Units are named for counties served. In the 1970s Operational Units were referred to as Ranger Units. Ranger Units were grouped into six CDF Regions, which may have been called Districts in earlier years. Radios were configured in a hierarchy with channel selections for Local (serving a Ranger Unit), District/Region, and State nets. By switching to the State channel, any two CDF radios statewide could communicate. Fire units from different Ranger Units but within the same district or region could communicate on the Region channel.

Signaling

1970s CDF systems used single tone or tone burst to select repeaters. The system had five tones statewide, allowing up to five repeaters in overlapping radio coverage areas on the same channel. Tones used, in order from tone 1 through 5, were: 1,800 Hz, 1,950 Hz, 2,200 Hz, 2,400 Hz and 2,552 Hz. Station ringdowns and some volunteer sirens were actuated using a Motorola selective calling scheme called Quik Call I.

During the conversion from tone burst to CTCSS in the early 1980s, Department of General Services (DoGS) technicians modified repeaters to work with either burst tones or CTCSS (sub-audible) tones. This allowed repeaters to be used with either type of signaling as the tone burst mobiles were swapped out for newer models.

Equipment

Like most State equipment, CDF used a mix of radios from several manufacturers varying from one contract bid to the next. Scanning, selectable tone burst, six channel transmit, and three channel receive were beyond the capabilities of most off-the-shelf mobile radios in 1970. Custom-made General Electric MASTR Professional hybrid tube/solid state mobiles were bought in one early 1970s contract. CDF was an early adopter of scanning: this radio incorporated General Electric's scanning feature, called Priority Search Lock Monitor.[20] Many of the CDF repeaters in service in 2009 are GE/MA-COM Mastr III synthesized base stations.

In the 1970s, at least some CDF repeaters were RCA Series 1000 units. These had solid state receivers and exciters with continuous duty tube final power amplifiers. They produced transmitter output powers in the range of 100-120 watts.

The earliest fully solid state mobile radios were used in the CTCSS conversion. They were 99-channel Midland radios. An early 1980s discovery was that users had to carry cards with lists of the channels. The radios had many channels and no alphanumeric display describing who you would talk to when the display said channel 65, for example. The Midland mobiles used flat, computer-hard-disk-style ribbon cable to connect the control head on the vehicle dash with the radio unit drawer. To improve reliability, some units used segments of discarded inch-and-a-half hose as a jacket to protect the easily-abraded ribbon cable.

Current CAL FIRE radio equipment in use is the Kenwood TK-790 mobile radio with a CDF-custom firmware package giving 254-channel capability, plus the ability to create a 'command group' for incident frequency management in one bank. Bendix-King GPH-CMD portable radios (HT's) give the same functionality in a 500-channel handheld. All older mobile and portable radios, including older BK EPH portables, either have been or are in process of being phased out, due to the pending requirement for all public safety radio nets to be narrow-banded.

Hearing a distant voice from a radio speaker, it was unclear what path the caller was using to reach you. This was especially true of dispatch consoles, which routed audio from many channels to one or two speakers. Radio protocol provided that users announce which channel and tone they were using in order that the called party would answer on the same channel and tone. A typical transmission where an engine was calling, preparing to tell something to dispatch, might be phrased, "San Andreas, Forty Six Eighty Eight, Local Net, Tone One." This queued the San Andreas dispatcher to manually select Local, Tone One or L1 to answer.

Administration

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the appointment of Del Walters as director of CAL FIRE. He is the second CAL FIRE director who came from within the CALFIRE ranks. The first was Dick Ernest.