[BARC-List] SOS: Emergency ggencies unable to talk to each other

[Frank Murphy]

From: BFoley@USE.SalvationArmy.Org
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 11:43:40 -0500
To: n1dhw@attbi.com
Subject: SOS: Emergency agencies often unable to talk to each other


----- Forwarded by Bill Foley/MAS/USE/SArmy on 11/22/2002 11:44 AM -----
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 To: WW9E@aol.com        11/22/2002 09:59 AM         cc: all
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Subject:  SOS: Emergency agencies often unable to talk to
               each other
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This was forwarded to me by Mac McDonald AB5SG, a SATERN member from
Oklahoma. The available solution is amateur radio.

By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY

DENVER ? More than 14 months after radio problems contributed to the deaths
of New York firefighters in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many of
America's 73,000 police, fire and other public-safety agencies still can't
talk to each other in major emergencies.

The reasons range from incompatible equipment to interference from cellular
phones. But the result is the same: Emergency commanders often can't
communicate quickly, or even at all, with every department at a disaster
scene. Worse, they can't always relay orders, warnings and other critical
information to "first responders" on the front lines of major fires,
storms, SWAT sieges, police chases and terrorism incidents.

This lack of "interoperability," as public-safety officials call it, is a
major homeland security worry. It's "among the risks that the United States
still confronts," says an independent national study led by former U.S.
senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. Their report, "America Still
Unprepared ? America Still in Danger," released in October, says "in
virtually every major city and county in the United States, no
interoperable communications system exists." They recommend paying for
"commercial off-the-shelf technologies" to fix the problem.

But money to help do that was caught in the political stalemate over the
proposed homeland security department. A Senate amendment for $3.5 billion
in first-responder funds ? including grants for communications upgrades ?
was left out of the bill to create the department and can't be addressed
again until next year.

"They know it's not going to pay for their whole system, but they need
something to get started," says Julio "Rick" Murphy of the Public Safety
Wireless Network, a federal initiative to promote interoperability. Some
experts estimate it still could cost as much as $25 billion or more to
connect every agency in the USA that wants or needs the capability.

As cities, counties and states clamor for federal dollars, those that can
afford to are trying to bridge the gaps on their own with new
multimillion-dollar systems. Less costly equipment that can "patch" calls
between incompatible radio networks also is in brisk demand since 9/11.

"Almost everybody has some ... problems. It's just a matter of to what
degree," says Harlin McEwen, a retired police chief and former FBI
information deputy who handles telecommunications issues for the
International Association of Chiefs of Police.

=B7 Some agencies can't link up with each other because their hardware is
incompatible. Older or outdated radios can't "talk" to newer ones, or
equipment made by one company has different specifications than another's.

=B7 Other networks operate on frequencies or bands too far apart for ordinary
radio gear to bridge. Public safety's share of those frequencies is
interspersed across the radio spectrum.

=B7 There aren't enough radio frequencies and channels available to police,
fire, medical and other emergency departments. Five years to the day before
the Sept. 11 disaster, a 1996 report by the Public Safety Wireless Advisory
Committee estimated that public-safety agencies will need twice as much
space on the spectrum by 2010 as they now have.

=B7 For some police and fire departments in cities from Denver to Miami,
emergency traffic also is interrupted by interference from commercial
wireless services ? cell phones, pagers and other technologies ? that share
or border the same airwaves. "If you can't coordinate your efforts, you're
in serious trouble," says Steve Cooper, technical and support division
chief for the Denver Police Department. "You can't send people out carrying
eight different radios."

Before Pennsylvania recently set up a statewide system, one local agency
there did just that, installing seven radios in an ambulance so it could
connect with the other public-safety departments in its service area.

After the bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building in 1995, couriers had
to run messages on foot between agencies whose radios couldn't speak to
each other.

In 1997, National Guard and other rescuers in an Indiana flood were forced
to shout across a rain-swollen river because their radios couldn't connect.

At the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, few of the 46 Denver-area
police, fire and medical departments that responded could connect in the
logjam of different radios on different channels across the radio spectrum.

In Oregon today, there are cases when a state trooper and a Portland police
officer parked across Interstate 5 from each other can't communicate by
radio.

Deadly consequences

The consequences can be fatal. Two years ago in Oklahoma City, a state
trooper racing to assist another trooper in a traffic stop on Interstate 40
didn't know a city police car and suspects were in a high-speed, wrong-way
chase toward him on the same stretch of road. They all crashed on the crest
of a hill. Both officers and two suspects died.

"Now, some of our troopers are carrying four or five different radios in
their cars," says Bob Ricks, public safety commissioner for Oklahoma, which
is trying to build a $77 million system for statewide public-safety
communications.

The deadliest case by far was at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, when
word of the south tower's collapse didn't reach an estimated 120
firefighters who perished when the north tower fell. The New York Times
reported this month that recordings of radio traffic that day suggest that
equipment to boost signals may not have failed in the attack, as previously
thought. But the inability of police and fire radios to connect with each
other still meant that a critical warning from a police helicopter about 20
minutes before the second collapse never reached those firefighters.

"It always seems to take a disaster, and another disaster, and another to
make people wake up," says Tom Tolman of the National Law Enforcement and
Corrections Technology Center, a University of Denver program that
coordinates national research on the issue.

The radio mess has been an issue for at least two decades.

In the 1980s, pagers, cell phones and other wireless technology began
taking over larger chunks of radio spectrum originally reserved for
public-safety use. At the same time, competing radio makers were beginning
to market models that, while more sophisticated, weren't built to a single
standard and so were incompatible ? not unlike a VHS videotape and a
Betamax VCR. As a result, there was more crowding and interference, and
less ability to connect.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks gave new urgency to a federal effort to
realign the use of the airwaves. Under one proposal, bands of radio
spectrum would be swapped to consolidate commercial wireless services and
emergency radio users into frequency ranges far enough apart to prevent
cell phone interference.

Meanwhile, a number of states ? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and
New Hampshire among them ? have built or are building digital radio
networks to link all state agencies and local departments. But at hundreds
or thousands of dollars per radio, not every agency can afford to join in.
Nor are local departments always willing to switch if they have otherwise
reliable systems or have recently bought different radio gear.

The Public Safety Wireless Network says just three states ? Delaware,
Michigan and North Carolina ? have "mature" or widespread interoperability.
A dozen states barely have begun dealing with the issue. The rest are in
varying stages of development.

Enter the ACU-1000

Severe budget shortfalls also have slowed some efforts. Completion of
Colorado's new system has been put off until 2006. Oklahoma is looking for
money to start its proposed network. In Ohio, the state plans to charge
local departments to use its $328 million system. Indiana restructured
taxes to pay for its "Hoosier Safe-T" system, a network twice rejected by
legislators until 9/11 lent new urgency.

A less-expensive alternative gaining popularity is the ACU-1000, a $10,000
to $30,000 device that can electronically link several different radio
systems at a disaster scene. Its maker, JPS Communications of Raleigh,
N.C., has boosted production since Sept. 11. New York City had even
received several JPS units the month before the attacks and was planning to
test and train on them that autumn. When the Pentagon was hit, a JPS
representative was in the building, teaching a course on how to use the
device.

The state of Maryland is building a 22-site system with such technology. A
network of local, state and federal agencies in San Diego uses it. And
Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communication installed
ACU-1000s in a retired ambulance to make a "Field Com" mobile command post.
"It's like a big switchboard," city spokesman Larry Langford says.

In August, the office staged a mock disaster that mimicked, and overcame,
the communications problems that doomed New York firefighters at the Trade
Center.

Armfuls of radio

In a separate federal effort based on battlefield communications, the Naval
Research Laboratory in Washington has created InfraLynx, a Humvee packed
with similar communications gear, from the radio "patch" to a rooftop
cellular phone tower and satellite dish.

Without funding, many local departments will cope in low-tech ways. Some
still relay messages to neighboring agencies through radio dispatchers who
pick up the phone to talk to each other.

In Boulder County, Colo., Sheriff George Epp keeps a "fire cache" of extra
radios for other jurisdictions to use at wildfires and other joint
operations. It would cost $6 million to replace his department's older
VHF-band radios and join the state's 800-megahertz system, money the county
doesn't have. So whenever Epp's patrols are on the border of neighboring
jurisdictions with which Boulder County can't connect directly, his
deputies carry extra radios that can.

"Old technology, some people would call it. But it works," says Epp, who
serves on a National Institute of Justice task force drafting community
guidelines for assessing how "interoperable" neighboring police, fire and
medical rescuers need to be.

Epp and others caution that all the new gear in the world won't make up for
human factors that can disrupt communication. Those can include turf
battles between police and fire at a disaster scene (an issue in New York
on Sept. 11), lack of discipline in sharing the airwaves in a crisis, even
confusion among agencies that use different codes and terminology in
over-the-air conversations.

Donald Lund, who heads a University of New Hampshire research project on
law enforcement technology, says studies of emergencies such as police
chases and major fires found that up to a quarter of the communications
problems were due to simple sloppiness. Radio users blocked or jammed
critical conversations by inadvertently pushing the "talk" button on their
radio handset when others on the network were trying to speak.

"The technology issue is going to get fixed," Lund says, "but the human
part is probably as difficult or more difficult to deal with."