Butte County CDF and County Fire are dispatched by CDF Emergency Communications Center in Oroville at CDF Headquarters. All fire equipment other than Chico and Paradise City are dispatched on CDF Local Net. Oroville and Gridley recently moved to CDF/County dispatch, leaving their old dispatch freqs for the new "city fire nets." This allows much faster and more efficient dispatching. Earlier they had to coordinate with Oroville or Gridley City Fire for mutual aid purposes and such.
CDF Engines are manned during both the fire season and off season. During the off season they assist the County units in responding to structure fires and traffic collisions. Many other Ranger Units are under contract like this in the state where CDF is active all year long.
It takes only 4 frequencies to monitor every fire dispatch from within the county. CDF Local Net will cover all but Plumas USFS, Paradise and Chico FD's. Those other three have their own dispatch system. All four agencies have excellent mutual aid programs and without hesitation will assist each other in any type of call.
Butte Support Net is a county-wide repeater system that allows for additional command and logistics traffic on a large incident. This is a must-have for fire season monitoring.
County fire stations are numbered and the engines and equipment in the stations are numbered accordingly to the station. The primary engine for Station 41 would be "Engine 41". The secondary engine is "Engine 241" and the squad would be "Squad 41". There may be a "Rescue 41" and "Watertender 41". This makes it VERY easy to tell what stations have responded to a fire. If you happen upon an incident and don't know where it is - hearing the general engine numbers can give you an area where the incident it occuring.