<strong>Brand Story - In addition to providing cloud and managed IT services, Beaverton’s Elevate Technology Group works to lessen the digital divide and support communities in times of need.</strong>
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A report on how internet has still not come back to areas burned in the Holiday Farm Fire in Sept. 2020.
Royal, John, and Katy Lewis do their online classes in their car because they can use the internet in the parking lot of the Christian Church in McKenzie Bridge.
Credit Rachael McDonald
On a given day, you’ll see several cars in the parking lot outside the Christian Church along highway 126 in McKenzie Bridge. This is one of the few places you can get high speed internet. People sit in their cars on zoom calls, attend online school, or catch up with family and friends on social media.
Oregon s Holiday Farm Fire left very little behind as it tore through the McKenzie River Valley east of Eugene in the fall of 2020. Cell service was eliminated as 27 miles of fiber were destroyed along with homes and businesses, leaving roughly 800 people without a way to communicate with the outside world. But the communities scattered across the valley quickly came together to create their own makeshift network using point-to-multipoint wireless. For some of them, the new DIY Internet service is delivering faster speeds than they had before.
The volunteer group that built the network calls itself Oregon Internet Response. It s led by Geoff Turner, a central Oregon native who got his start doing IT work for a church and launched his first company at age 14. Today Turner is based in Portland as CEO of Elevate Technology Group, an IT services company that was preparing to build a fixed wireless hybrid fiber network to facilitate remote work in other parts of Oregon when the forest f