Three of the five members appointed to Dawson’s Trustee’s Advisory Council were available for the first public meeting on June 7. Left to right: Kevin Hewer, Trustee Ray Hayes, Kelly Millar, Bill Bowie. Photo by Dan Davidson

Dawson Trustee Warns Internet Users Not to be Gluttons

by Dan Davidson

Bandwidth hogs beware. The City of Dawson has your account numbers and you will be dealt with.

That was the essence of the warning delivered by Dawson’s Trustee, Ray Hayes, at the first meeting of the Trustee’s Advisory Council on July 6.

Hayes says that one of the biggest frustrations he has had to deal with since taking on his duties on April 12 has been the deterioration of Dawson’s internet service, which seemed to begin the day after he took office.

Either e-mail services or internet access - sometimes both - have been spotty on a regular basis throughout May and June.

Hayes says that the town has tried various fixes. Technicians have been brought in from the City’s technical consultant. Polarcom, and equipment has been retuned. More bandwidth was purchased to ease the traffic. All of these things seemed to work for a few days each time, and then service would fall off again.

“I don’t want this trial and error stuff,” Hayes told his advisory group. “I want to know what the problem is.”

What Hayes has now discovered is that former city manager Scott Coulson dealt with this problem on a regular basis, and that the usual cause seemed to be customers who were doing vast amounts of file sharing through links that allow users to share audio and video files with other users all over the world.

“(Scott) was able to go in and find out who the bandwidth hogs were. When he found out who it was, he would make a phone call, and say ‘You have 24 hours to clean this up or you’re not going to be a customer anymore.’”

Hayes now plans to do something very similar.

“We will shut them down. We just cannot afford to provide that level of service to everyone.”

Dawson’s internet, which was first proposed at a time when there was no comparable service to the town, marginally breaks even if you don’t count the debt load on the roughly $1 million borrowed to string the town with fibre optic and coaxial cable. Hayes says the town simply cannot afford to buy the bandwidth for what some people seem to want to do, not unless those users want to pay a lot more for their service connection.

In the meantime, Dawson’s customers can expect some planned service disruptions caused by the replacement of power poles in the Klondike Valley as the highway reconstruction is carried out between downtown and the Callison Industrial subdivision.

Hayes wants to be able to announce just when those will happen so that people can be prepared.

Uffish Thoughts: Life in the Fire Zone Makes You Look at the Weather

by Dan Davidson

It's Thursday morning. The temperature began the day at about 15° C. There's a slight haze in the air and a faint smell of burning trees as I look down the river. Environment Canada says there's a 40% chance of rain showers, but the more heartening detail is that the relative humidity has climbed from 45 to 63 in the last hour or so.

I'm not one of those people who

Getting a good overhead view of Dawson City was one of the few things that tourists could not do in July. Photo by Dan Davidson.

tends to check out the weather forecast every day, but it becomes a more significant part of your life when you're in a hot zone during fire season. You really want to know about the forecast for rain and the relative humidity.

Relative Humidity is an important concept when it comes to thinking about how a fire might spread. It’s a tricky thing to calculate, since it compares the actual amount of water in the air at any given time with the known amount that the air could hold at a certain temperature. What’s important here is that the higher the RH, the less likely it is that fuel sources will ignite. RH can be even more significant than a fire break in some cases.

For example, a combination of intelligent tree thinning and a sprinkler system to boost the RH saved the Ancient Voices retreat near here in 1999, the last time things got really hot in the Klondike. Brush clearing and sprinkler systems have been used to protect what the wildfire management people call “values” (ie - human structures) in the middle of the fire zone, and officials tell us that more than a dozen of these have been rescued so far, with none lost.

Dawson hasn't been completely cut off during this fire season. Road closures have tended to be of short duration during periods of active burning across highways or when the smoke was thick enough that a pilot car and single file traffic was a good idea. This is generally no more of an inconvenience than one might experience during highway construction, where delays of 10 minutes to half an hour are quite common.

Restaurant owners are quick to point out that the only reason they might be lacking some items on the menu is that they have about 100 voracious young men and women gobbling down substantial meals when they come in from the line after a shift. It isn't true that the freight trucks aren't getting through with supplies.

Rumours are lots of fun in a fire zone. The village of Chicken, Alaska, was said to have been wiped out by fire on three separate occasions since I returned from my brief holiday in Ontario. It's still there and residents want everyone to know it's open for business, but the story keeps making the rounds.

I left an emergency measures organization meeting a couple of days ago and entered the post office just in time to have a person tell me that Rock Creek (a half hour south of here) was being evacuated. That wasn't true either.

I can see why EMO types are so reluctant even to use the "E" word. You have to plan for it, but the mere mention of the plan sets people off on flights of fancy.

RV Parks owners told me last night that business is only marginally effected by all of this so far. Without the fires and inconvenience it might have been a great summer, but it's still a good one from their perspective.

As I conclude this column it has begun to rain here. If the Wildfire Management fire behavior specialist has it right, this won’t amount to much, one to three millimetres at best, and most of it will fall where it isn’t needed. Estimates are that it would take 5 to 8 days of steady rain or at least drizzle all over the fire zone to have a real effect on our fires.

This would need to be rain without the attendant thunder and lightning. Of the thirty or so fires within 200 km of Dawson and the nearly 150 across the territory as a whole, that vast majority have been started by lightning this summer.

That’s nice. It’s usually more like 50/50.