Lake County Commissioners declare State of Emergency

Emergency Declaration of county emergency due to a fiber optic outage affecting the majority of Lake County.

LAKEVIEW, Ore. - The Board of Commissioners approved Resolution 2023-04 declaring the emergency during an Emergency Session Meeting on July 24, 2023.

A fiber optic line supporting services to Lakeview, Plush, Adel, New Pine Creek, Paisley, and Summer Lake has been significantly damaged on July 22 by the Golden Fire.

Restoration to the line is not known yet.

Lake County Emergency Management has been working on triaging the connection loss.

Lake County has also been working with Oregon Emergency Management, Department of Administrative Services, Oregon Department of Human Services Office of Resilience and Emergency Management to restore emergency connections for 911, Lakeview Interagency Fire Center, and Lake Health District since the outage occurred.

According to a press release by Lake County, “Temporary First Net and Verizon deployable towers have arrived at the locations and are providing services. Additional devices and support have been requested to improve bandwidth at these locations. County officials are working to triage other services within the affected areas.”

Lake County 911 has communication established with Klamath County 911.

“Currently, all Lake County 911 calls are automatically routed to Klamath County 911, if you need 911 services continue to dial 911 as you normally would.” stated the release.

The County has submitted requests to the State of Oregon for aid for other critical services in the communities and hopes to have them connected soon.

Through their Facebook page, Fireserve Broadband Internet has stated their services are up due to a microwave-linked backup system. But customers may experience slower speeds during peek usage.

“…speeds may be a little lower during peak usage hours than usual, but we're the only Internet provider that is still up and running in the Lakeview area,” said Fireserve. “We have our own independent backup microwave link between Klamath and Lakeview that continues providing our Lakeview area customers Internet in the meantime. Our Internet service continued operating when all the others went down, but we appreciate your patience with the temporarily reduced speeds, particularly during the evening peak usage hours.”