[Scan-DC] For hours over Mother’s Day weekend, Montgomery police and fire crews struggled to communicate

[Alan Henney]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/for-hours-over-mothers-day-weekend-montgomery-police-and-fire-crews-struggled-to-communicate/2019/05/26/7670fa22-7d75-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3Gpcg4fS4zP25WP6E48lcBENUB8Uv5KclCZLNl8_kMFi7_ZDPMWb7cZgo&noredirect=on&utm_term=.b9afbb5f9f47

Public Safety
For hours over Mother’s Day weekend, Montgomery police and fire crews
struggled to communicate

(Courtesy of Montgomery County Police/Courtesy of Montgomery County Police)
By Jennifer Barrios May 26
It was nearing the beginning of Mother’s Day weekend in Montgomery County
when police dispatchers began hearing a strange noise over their radios.

Instead of being able to communicate with officers, they heard a sound like
a “bonk.” Then another “bonk.”

Calls were not going through.

“They couldn’t explain what was happening,” said Montgomery County Fire and
Rescue Service Capt. Dallas Lipp, who is involved with the management of
the county’s public safety radio system and got a phone call from the
supervisor on duty late on the night of Friday, May 10. As the two
officials were talking, Lipp said, the radio failure happened again.

The noises were the start of a 14-hour-long outage that disrupted
communications through the aging system, which is used by police, fire, the
sheriff’s department and others in the county of 1 million residents just
outside Washington.


It was, Lipp said, “by far the longest disruption we’ve had since we went
live on the network.”


Montgomery County Council member Hans Riemer (D) said the system’s failures
are “a matter of life and death.” (Cheryl Diaz Meyer/For The Washington
Post)
That weekend was quiet — no shootings or fights, large fires or other major
emergencies — so the outage didn’t significantly disrupt public safety,
officials said. Police used their in-car computers and switched to
alternate radio channels to speak with dispatchers and other officers.

But the incident has become a rallying cry for some officials and advocates
frustrated with what they say are unacceptable delays in upgrading the
communications system, which was installed nearly two decades ago.

The $45 million project to replace the current 11-tower system with an
upgraded 22-tower system has been in the works for years, and Lipp says the
goal was to have the infrastructure in place by 2013. Than plan was delayed
by contracting and other issues, and the project also suffered from limited
resources for several years during the county’s recovery from the Great
Recession.

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Now critics say the timetable could be reset again following a recent
decision by County Executive Marc Elrich (D) to look for new locations for
two communications towers that were supposed to be placed near communities
that don’t want them.

In an era of mass shootings at schools and other public places, and in a
jurisdiction where a gas explosion and fire killed seven at an apartment
building in Silver Spring in 2016, some officials say the county cannot
afford to wait.


Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) is facing criticism for a
decision that could further delay the tower system’s upgrade. (Michael S.
Williamson/The Washington Post)
“It’s a matter of life and death,” said County Council member Hans Riemer
(D-At Large). “This thing could go down right now — it could be down as we
speak.”

Andrew Kleine, chief administrative officer for the county, said work on
the upgrade is continuing even without the two new towers — the proposed
locations of which, he said, were chosen without adequate community input.
The overhaul remains on schedule, he said, and is expected to be
operational in two years.


“Those two sites are going to be delayed, but we don’t want to delay the
operation of the system as a whole,” Kleine said. “We certainly would not
change the sites if we felt like it was going to cause any kind of risk to
public safety.”

He said the county has purchased additional equipment since the outage on
May 10 and 11 to address the cause and stabilize the system.

Riemer and council Vice President Sidney Katz (D-District 3), who chairs
the body’s public safety committee, wrote to Elrich last month, saying his
decision to delay the two towers — a state tower at the Intercounty
Connector and Georgia Avenue in Olney that the county would have shared,
and another in Bretton Woods — has “strained” the system.

“I think it’s literally crazy we would delay replacing a failing public
safety system,” Riemer said in an interview. “We need the county executive
to reverse course here and follow through on the plan and get those towers
up.”


Residents who have pushed for the new tower locations say they shouldn’t be
blamed for the lags in implementing the new system.

“The county has been aware this system has been failing for a long time,”
said Matt Quinn, president of the Greater Olney Civic Association.

Quinn said his group has been working with the county and the state to find
a more acceptable location for the tower — and believes they have found
one, just a short distance away.

State Sen. Benjamin F. Kramer (D-Montgomery) said community members were
upset they hadn’t heard about the towers during the planning stages.

“Suddenly these neighborhoods were going to have a massive steel structure
contiguous to their communities and you would have seen it anywhere you
were,” Kramer said, adding that some residents also were concerned about
possible health effects from the equipment. “It may have suited the needs
of county and state government, but it doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate
location for this kind of massive structure.”


Shanteé Felix, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of
Transportation’s State Highway Administration, said that while the original
Olney site is still “under consideration,” the agency is working on
identifying “possible alternative sites.”

Dale Tibbitts, special assistant to Elrich, said alternative sites to the
Bretton Woods tower are still being worked out.

“We do not discount the public safety component of this,” he said. “We
think we’ve come up with a new way of dealing with these last two towers
and keeping the rest of the system on track, on schedule.”

Meanwhile, the council’s public safety and government operations and fiscal
policy committees plan to hold a joint hearing next month on the
communications system.

Susan Farag, legislative analyst for the council, said the committees will
seek information on options for alternative communications, how the system
could operate with two fewer towers and whether there will be gaps in
coverage as a result.


“We need to work together and we will work together to solve this concern,”
said Katz, who also sits on the government operations committee. “The
bottom line on this is we need to get something done.”

Lipp said another, smaller disruption occurred on Wednesday afternoon, when
the normal 16 channels suddenly went down to just six. As the evening
commute began, “all of a sudden we started getting ‘bonks’ again,” Lipp
said.

He said it’s still unclear what caused that outage. “We don’t have
confidence in any of this equipment,” he said. “It’s all antique stuff.”

Dan Morse contributed to this report.