SoCal Fire Report - Is Net Neutrality impacting Fire & Rescue?

This is the the SoCal Steemit Fire Report. The main goal is to provide information about the numerous fires during fire season. Additionally, our mission is to report any natural disasters and provide a hub for supporting any steemian displaced by a natural disaster in Southern California.

They say do something you are good at, well Southern California is good at catching on fire. So we at @socalsteemit would like to provide a centralized hub of the information on fires and natural disasters located in SoCal. Please refer to previous Fire Reports for any incident prior to this timeline.

Well, temps have started to drop back down to a normal level here in So Cal, but we've still got a number of small fires across the state:

The Carr Fire - 93% contained
The Holy Fire - 93% contained

And the biggest in California history - The Mendocino Complex Fire - is only at 67% containment and lost acreage has grown to 400,000 acres which is nearly half the size of Rhode Island!

The rough terrain and steep inclines have been making the job very difficult for some 3500 firefighters, and while nature hasn't been making things any easier with the abnormally high temperatures, it seems they've got another fight to battle. With Verizon.

Yes, you read that right. Prior to the fire breaking out on July 30, one Bay Area fire department was dealing with their Verizon bill because they were being throttled over a $2 difference in plan rates. In order to get their devices back up to speed, they needed to switch plans from $37.99 to $39.99. On July 30th, the rate mysteriously jumped to $99.99 to remove the throttling despite the fact the fire department was subscribed to a specific, unlimited government plan that reduces speeds after a certain amount of data has been used but is to be lifted as soon as the fire department contacted Verizon about the emergency state.

Now to be fair, it should be noted that there are no injuries or deaths directly caused by this data slow down (that can be proved), but what was impacted was the Fire Dept's mobile communications and incident support vehicle - the OES-5262.

OES5262 is basically a fire truck without the fire fighting tools. Instead, it has a command center and all the techy bells and whistles needed to effectively manage all of the agencies and personnel coming together to fight this fire together. So - the HUB of where all activity is managed,making sure operations run smoothly and everyone is where they are supposed to be. It helps with evacuation notices and communication between the agencies, as well.

Despite pleading emails from the fire department, they were met with poor customer service and a terrible solution of tripling the monthly bill before restoring speeds to devices responsible for communications. You can read the email exchange here:

https://bgr.com/2018/08/21/verizon-unlimited-throttling-fire-department-emails-wtf/

They say this has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Just a case of poor customer service....

What do you think? Comment below - lets chat about this one!!

#SoCalSteemit is building and supporting the Steemit community of Southern California. If you are from SoCal and are into creating quality content here on Steemit, we'd love for you to follow us @SoCalSteemit and join our group on Discord