Subject: [NEXTEL-1] SOS: Emergency agencies often unable to talk to each other

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11/20/2002 - Updated 12:25 AM ET

SOS: Emergency agencies often unable to talk to each other

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.

A display of radios from several different agencies.

By Anne Ryan, USA TODAY

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 radios

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."

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