By Greg Esposito
The Roanoke Times
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Va. — The Montgomery County Office of Emergency Services has received an $850,000 grant to improve communications among emergency responders through a radio cache that will be maintained by the Virginia Tech Rescue Squad.
The grant, from the Commonwealth Interoperability Coordinators Office, will fund the creation of a system that will consist of 200 to 300 portable radios and communication equipment to be used by emergency responders.
It will serve as a portable backup communications system should bad weather disable normal communications that police, fire and rescue squads typically rely on. It will also serve to enhance radio communications among different jurisdictions during emergencies.
“The grander scheme is to create what you call talk groups,” said Capt. Matthew Johnson of the Virginia Tech Rescue Squad. “Basically, what you do there is take different people from different agencies who are trying to accomplish the same task and you can put them all together.”
Johnson said the exact location of the cache is yet to be determined but it will likely be on Tech’s campus and fall under the responsibility of the Tech rescue squad. But it will be a county-owned resource.
There are three other similar collections of radios in the state, supported by the Virginia State Interoperability Executive Committee. The caches are located in Northern Virginia, Chesapeake and Harrisonburg. Lunenburg County also recently received a grant for a radio cache. They are strategically located so responders can use them at emergencies throughout the state.
During the manhunt for Douglas Jaccard in Wythe County last month, for instance, police used the Harrisonburg radio cache. In the future, the Montgomery County cache would be used, said Montgomery County Emergency Services Coordinator Neal Turner.
Johnson said discussions between Montgomery County and the Tech rescue squad about the grant began last summer. He’s hopeful the cache will be operational by June or July.
The radios will also be used during events that attract large crowds of people and multiple emergency agencies. Turner said they will be used at every Tech home football game. He said the radios will help the different agencies coordinate efforts and provide valuable practice in a non-emergency situation.
“It will give us an opportunity to put these portable radios in the hands of those people who will actually operate the heart and soul of this system in an emergency,” Turner said. “It gives us the most realistic exercise of the equipment.”
Johnson said any area could be prone to a major emergency that would attract multiple jurisdictions, but the April 16, 2007, shootings at Tech called attention to the need for the cache.
Turner said the shootings, with dozens of emergency agencies involved and communicating on different radio frequencies, were a textbook example for the use of the radio cache. The radios make communication in such an event much easier and more efficient, he said.
“We had so many people on the ground -- fire, rescue and police personnel on the ground -- that it was almost impossible for everybody to know what was going on in real-time fashion,” Turner said. “If you had fire, rescue and police all working at one event, you want all police to talk together, all rescue to talk together and all fire to talk together and you’d want one person of each to be able to communicate with each other.”