Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Finding the frequency Possible role of radio problems in Cedar fire under scrutiny

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 13:33:22 -0500

Firestorm 2003
Finding the frequency  Possible role of radio problems in Cedar fire
under scrutiny

By Gregory Alan Gross
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 8, 2003

When firefighters went face to face with the most destructive wildfire
in
California history, their most reliable method for communicating with
each
other may have been shouting.

Among the post-mortems being conducted by fire officials is whether any
of
the more than 2,200 homes lost to the Cedar fire were destroyed because
of
communications challenges.

Mismatched radio systems left U.S. Forest Service crews unable to talk
to
their counterparts in other fire agencies.

Some firefighters resorted to palm-size Family Radio Service devices
that
sell for as little as $25 apiece after the failure of their regular
radios,
which cost thousands of dollars each.

At times, supervisors had to leave their crews in trucks parked in the
field
and drive back to their base camp to get instructions because they
couldn't
reach anyone by radio.

Some out-of-town "strike teams" that were supposed to have radios
"cloned"
to enable them to talk to commanders never got them.

Radio "repeaters," transmitters normally placed temporarily on
mountaintops
to give firefighting radios extended range, couldn't be installed
because
helicopter pilots couldn't cope with the Santa Ana winds and smoke over
the
mountain peaks.

Combined with overused cellular telephone channels and even cross-border
radio interference from Mexico, those factors helped turn firefighting
communications into an intermittent nightmare.

For San Diego city firefighters, the problems were even more fundamental
-
and more frustrating. Crews found themselves unable to talk to anyone
when
their radio batteries went dead, and there were neither fresh
replacements
nor battery chargers available.

Whether any of these problems led directly to the loss of homes has not
been
determined.

"I haven't heard from all our people yet, but at this point I wouldn't
be
comfortable saying absolutely that it didn't," said Jeff Frazier,
operations
chief for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.

Many of the problems were not one-time glitches, but chronic ills that
have
beset firefighters for years, problems that will take time - and
millions of
dollars - to fix.

It's not the first time communications have been an issue during a major
fire in San Diego County. Similar woes and worse occurred during the
1970
Laguna fire. It led to a rethinking of the fire command structure and
changes in protocol.

"Back then, we had fire departments across the street from each other
who
couldn't talk to each other," said Brian Kornegay, communications team
leader on the Cedar fire for the California Department of Forestry and
Fire
Protection.

Kornegay downplayed the severity of communications problems during the
Cedar
fire.

"We had one of our mobile repeaters get burned over on Cuyamaca, which
basically knocked it out, but we had two others we were using," Kornegay
said. "Communications wasn't really a problem."

Not everyone saw it that way.

Jim McGuire, a CDF contractor responsible for radios and repeaters
during
the fires, said getting temporary communications equipment into place on
the
second and third day of the Cedar and Paradise fires was difficult
because
helicopters couldn't fly in the heavy winds and smoke.

Chris Hinshaw, operations chief for the county Sheriff's Department's
radio
system, said problems were especially pronounced when Forest Service
fire
crews and out-of-town strike teams tried to talk to each other over old
VHF
radios.

"We had a lot of 'busies' reported by firefighters during both the Cedar
and
Paradise fires," Hinshaw said. "None were for longer than 19 seconds.
It's
not a huge problem, but 19 seconds in an emergency can be an eternity."

Gil Garcia, the Cedar fire's incident communications commander, who
works
for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said many of the problems
were
expected. That's because local agencies are constantly upgrading radio
systems and often don't coordinate with other agencies in the area, for
reasons from cost to convenience.

Many agencies have gone to an 800-megahertz system, which has an
expanded
number of channels, but others have not. What's more, not all
800-megahertz
systems are created equal. Some are analog while other are digital,
which
puts their signals at opposite ends of the radio-wave spectrum, making
them
incompatible with each other.

Attempts have been made over the years to get around the jumble of
different
systems.

The CDF and the Forest Service, for example, use basic radios that other
agencies can clone, or reset their radio frequencies so they can talk to
each other.

"Resources that come from all over the state come with radios to be
cloned,"
Garcia said.

Typically, fire crews start out at a base camp, cloning their radios to
the
proper frequencies or checking out radios that can be cloned to
communicate
with fire officials.

But there can be problems even with cloned radios. If the person talking
is
too far from the person listening, a radio may not work. Topography also
can
be a problem. To be able to transmit, you have to be in the line of
sight of
a repeater. If you're below it, you're out of luck.

Other hindrances include dense smoke - "Smoke puts ions in the air, and
that
causes communications problems," Garcia said - and user error,
especially
with unfamiliar radios.

Even when other fire departments are using the 800-megahertz systems
similar
to those used in San Diego, those systems are not always entirely
compatible.

"If, say, Orange County (fire units) come down here, there's only a
handful
of radio frequencies we can work on in common, and that's a challenge,"
Frazier said.

The 800-megahertz radios can be made compatible, but some crews went
straight into action without doing so, fire officials said.

Cell phones proved to be valuable backups, but they were overloaded
pretty
quickly.

"When we're busy on cell phones, the public's usually busy on cell
phones,
too," Frazier said. "It's difficult to get a signal because there's
other
people saturating the system."

Firefighters weren't the only ones being challenged. Dispatchers were
having
problems as well.

Just as firefighters sometimes couldn't connect their radio networks,
computer-driven dispatch systems for different agencies couldn't "talk"
to
each other, forcing dispatchers to trade information over the phone.

Help may be coming from Washington. The Justice and Treasury departments
have a joint project under way whose goal is "seamless, coordinated and
integrated public safety communications" at every level of government.

It's called the Public Safety Wireless Network (See
http://www.pswn.gov/) ,
and its director, Tim Ritter, is coming from Virginia next week to help
regional officials determine what San Diego County needs to enable old
and
new fire radio networks to link together more smoothly.

The San Diego Association of Fire Chiefs has its own communications
committee looking at the problem.

"San Diego County's regional communication system has a pretty good core
working group," Ritter said. "I know they're close to a solution. We
hope to
have it in place by January or February."

What no one is saying yet is what the improvements are likely to cost.

The Public Safety Wireless Network estimates the tab for replacing
public
safety radio equipment nationwide to be at least $18.3 billion.

Greg Gross: (619) 498-6632; [email-masked]
Staff writers Mark Arner and Irene McCormack Jackson contributed to this
report.

 http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/fires/20031108-9999_1n8radio.html

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