FYI - in case you didn’t know, the Atlanta land lines have been going out almost every night due to bad batteries on one of the repeaters (Mt Home, Trinity, Marriage Mt - it’s not clear, and RTI isn’t exactly doing their best to figure it out it seems….). Today it was out at about 7 pm, and even on a bluebird sunny day the outage is 1am to 9am, and there will be entire days and even weeks coming up without phones. This means we are without 911 access. Chief Gene has been diligently getting GRMS (walkie-talkie) radios to the most at-risk residents.

Fire personnel: we have GRMS channel 3 on the Elmore (UHF, short antenna) radio. That channel is NOT on the pager! Radio has to be on! That is the Atlanta emergency channel.

Residents/visitors: Get yourself a GRMS radio and get familiar with it. Reserve channel 3 for emergency calls. Keep calling - sometimes other radio traffic will overstep you or you wont reach anyone. It’s a line-of-sight radio. Even if they advertise 50 miles that means line of sight. Greylock to Atlanta is 100%, the dam