Last Thursday morning, just after the brunt of the much-hyped storm, Richard Dillman realized something was wrong with West Marin’s emergency radio system. Lynn Axelrod, Point Reyes Station’s disaster council coordinator, had hopped on the system and tried to reach Mr. Dillman, KWMR’s transmitter wrangler. But her voice came through scratchy. “I think it was seven in the morning. [She was] activating the command center at Point Reyes firehouse, and here she is talking and she’s cutting in and out and I can barely hear her,” he said. He soon realized it was not Ms. Axelrod’s radio but the repeater on top of Mount Vision—which amplifies the radio signal so it can be used in West Marin’s hilly landscape—that was broken. Luckily, the dozens of disaster council responders from Dillon Beach to Stinson Beach were able to switch to the other repeater, on Mount Barnabe, installed just this summer, so emergency communications about felled trees, flooded roads and power outages continued smoothly. “We were using both anyway so we just moved all traffic to the Barnabe repeater,” Mr. Dillman said. That afternoon he drove to the top of Vision, expecting to see a downed antenna, but it was still standing; in fact it was the 10-year-old repeater itself, a little box inside a small building, that had failed. (He said it was “75 percent dead.”) He put in a temporary replacement repeater in its stead, and said the malfunctioning unit would be fixed at a cost of $150 or so. Mr. Dillman explained that he had applied for grant money for the Barnabe repeater in the San Geronimo Valley both to bolster the signal in that area and for back up in case of a Mount Vision failure. He doesn’t believe the storm was to blame for the failure, but its timing was impeccable. “As they often do, they picked the worst possible time to fail,” he said. “It was one of the things I said it would be good for. Turned out I was right.”