By Ian Hoffman
Inside Bay Area (California)
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While Southern California’s big cities performed exceptionally on emergency communications, federal Homeland Security evaluators reported Wednesday that much of urban Northern California still is figuring out how to talk together in a disaster.
A new communications scorecard from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ranks San Francisco as the least prepared of any major city
in California and by at least one measure among the bottom 20 percent nationwide.
The East Bay, viewed by federal officials as a single urban area for most of the last five years, performed somewhat better. But as of this summer, Oakland and the counties of Alameda and Contra Costa still had difficulty proving to Washington that area politicians and heads of first-responder agencies fully backed a common radio network for the region.
Lack of that agreement has hampered Bay Area applications for federal dollars to upgrade radio systems that in some cases are more than a decade old and cramped by overcrowded airwaves. By contrast, San Jose and the South Bay began work on joint radio networks several years ago and rank as well as Southern California cities in the latest scorecard and in winning grant dollars.
San Francisco and East Bay officials say theyre making rapid progress on joint communications and expect to do better in competing for federal dollars. The Bay Areas cities and counties have agreed in principle, if not yet in writing, to a Bay-wide radio network allowing seamless communications among emergency workers.
At the same time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco is leading Democrats in pressing for more federal funding for emergency communications, and recent legislation is shifting analog television signals to create more radio frequency real estate for first responders four years earlier than expected.
The time is right, said Laura Phillips, San Francisco chief of emergency services. I call it the collision of collaboration, funding and spectra. Ive been working in this area for 27 years, and the conditions have never been as great for solving this problem.
Across the Bay, officials in Alameda and Contra Costa counties expect within a few months to rally local governments behind a pact to spend roughly $55 million on a common East Bay radio network, financed by bonds issued by a newly created authority.
Were hoping to get out there within the next six months, said former Alameda County fire chief Bill McCammon, a leader in county efforts toward a joint regional radio system. We want to get moving on this thing.
Terry Betts, communications chief for the Contra Costa County Sheriffs Department, said the region for years has struggled with overcrowded airwaves and government agencies wary of sharing the radio systems that are their primary means of command and control in the field.
I feel better about this system right now than I have in the last 10 years, Betts said. At some point everyone just seemed to be on board with it, and the ball just seemed to be rolling downhill.
Nationwide, only Washington, D.C., and five other big cities out of 75 nationwide scored perfectly in the Homeland Security Departments review of emergency radio communications. As a state, California generally scored well, but the federal scorecard noted shortcomings in San Francisco and the East Bay in regional cooperation and coherent long-term planning -- the areas that nationwide accounted most for mediocre scores among big cities.
All of the cities were required by the end of September to conduct exercises as a test of their radio systems, and San Francisco was among several criticized for failing to include state or federal agencies, such as the FBI and U.S. Coast Guard.
In San Franciscos exercise, electronic devices for knitting radio signals together did not stay powered, and some channels were misassigned, the report said.
The score didnt surprise me. We knew we had work to do, said San Franciscos Phillips, a former Motorola emergency communications manager.
It was a successful exercise because what we wanted to do is expose our gaps.
She said city officials this spring will be joining in grant applications with other Bay Area cities and counties for a regionwide radio system.
In the Bay Area, were all pretty much in agreement that we all want to talk to each other, Phillips said.