California Office of Emergency Services

Fire and Rescue Branch

Back to Fire Center 2007

OES Fire Freqs

• 154.160 OES 1
• 154.220 OES 2
• 154.280 White 1 (mutual aid)
• 154.265 White 2 (mutual aid)
• 154.295 White 3 (mutual aid)
• 868.9875 FireMARS
• 866.9125 FireMARS-2 (Cen-NorCal)

NorCal Engine Locations

• E213 Eureka FD
• E214 Mt. Shasta FD
• E247 Quincy FD
• E251 Woodland FD
• E256 Willows Rural FD
• E260 Ukiah FD
• E265 Susanville FD
• E286 Long Valley FD
• E287 Ft Bragg FD
• E293 Yuba City FD
• E294 Butte County FD
• E295 Linda FD
• E296 Redding FD
• E297 Chico FD
• E320 Corning
• E324 Red Bluff City

The California Office of Emergency Services Fire Branch is the manager of the most elaborate mutual aid system I have ever seen in the Fire Services. The OES Headquarters in Sacramento administers over the 6 OES regions in the state. Each region has a regional fire coordination center (Region 1 at LA County Fire, Region 2 at LNU ECC, Region 3 at North Ops, Region 4 at NEU ECC, Region 5 at FKU ECC and Region 6 at South Ops.) Within the regions, each county is a fire operational area (with an exception to LA County, which has 6 sub-operational areas and Lake Tahoe Basin is its own op-area). All the chiefs in the county elect an Operational Area coordinator to coordinate OES traffic in their area. All those OpArea coordinators fall under each Regional Coordinator. The Regional Coordinators move resources within the region and cooridnate with OES Fire and Rescue staff at the OES Headquarters in Sacramento. Additionally the 52xx units are OES employees that nuture the Mutual Aid system, respond to help administer strike teams and any other task needed by OES fire branch. All these coordinators help move not only the OES engine fleet, but every local government engine (engines not state or federally owned) in the state trained for strike teams as well.

OES assigns its engines to Local Gov fire agencies throughout the state. The engines can be used locally on a reserve engine basis (last minute response). OES can pull those engines out for a strike team at any given time unless already committed to another incident. Also, each local government fire department (not state or federally owned) has the opportunity to sign up each fire season as a strike-team-available department. OES then knows how many engines might be available out of each department for strike team needs.

The OES 1 and 2 freqs are currently being overhauled. They used to have lowband inputs and would catch Eastern US skip and repeat it all over the highband system. They are now converting them to VHF Hi inputs. The goal is to have OES 1 as a statewide OES Fire coordination net and OES 2 as a tactical/portable repeater option. White 1 through 3 are fire tactical/mutual aid channels. Any local government agency in California can use them for fire tactical or mutual aid purposes. The Fire MARS freqs are used like the White freqs - for 800Mhz users.