Copyright 2006 Capital City Press
All Rights Reserved
By PENNY BROWN ROBERTS
The Advocate (Louisiana)
A committee of Louisiana law-enforcement agencies charged with coordinating what has been deemed top priority in hurricane season preparations -- making sure they can talk to one another -- has yet to hold a single meeting.
Efforts have been stymied for months by behind-the-scenes fighting over who will control a radio and data system that allows emergency agencies to communicate in a crisis -- and the millions of federal dollars that come with it.
In January, Gov. Kathleen Blanco appointed a Statewide Interoperable Communication System Executive Committee stacked with state officials and light on local first-responders.
After the Louisiana Sheriffs Association and other local law-enforcement entities balked at their lack of representation and threatened not to cooperate, the governor agreed to expand the committee -- but still hasn’t appointed all of its members.
Hurricane season arrives June 1.
“Much to our dismay -- despite what we thought was a loud message demanding that we be in on the ground floor -- the commission basically did not include first-responders in a real way. It was all about the state agencies,” said Ascension Parish Sheriff Jeff Wiley, president of the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association.
“No sheriff fancies or fathoms being the overseer of this major entity; we’re comfortable with and understand the logic of State Police being the quarterback,” Wiley added. “But what we do want is to be first-string players. Because when it hits the fan, we’re the first ones on the scene.”
Turf tussles continue even as communication has been fingered repeatedly as the single largest barrier to emergency response after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29.
“A Failure of Initiative,” the final report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, concludes that despite millions of dollars in federal funding for technology and communications, “the absence of true communication interoperability within and between affected jurisdictions severely hindered rescue and response efforts at all levels of government.”
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, initially exposed the dramatic need for a uniform system nationwide through which emergency responders can talk to one another and exchange data -- known as interoperability.
Since then, the federal government has given $8.6 billion to states for equipment, first-responder training and disaster exercises. Last year alone, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave states $2.1 billion -- $935 million of which was allocated for communications upgrades.
Louisiana has gotten $135 million for preparedness since 1999 -- $108 million of which went to parish and municipal governments; the rest to the state. Of that, nearly $107 million was dedicated to equipment purchases, but only $16 million actually was spent on interoperability.
On top of that, the city of New Orleans got a $5.5 million Community Oriented Policing Services grant for interoperability, but by September 2005 had spent only $275,428 of it, said Gilbert Moore of the COPS Program External Affairs Office.
Nevertheless, police officers, deputies and other emergency workers responding to the disaster had to resort to using CB radios and dispatching messengers with handwritten notes to communicate, according to testimony before Congress earlier this year. Commanders in the New Orleans Police Department went for days after the storm without talking to any supervisors.
Water and wind knocked out land telephone lines and electricity to government and commercial communications towers, limiting -- and eliminating -- radio, cell phone and Internet availability. The New Orleans Police Department dispatch center flooded, disabling what little connectivity existed between the department and other agencies. And portable satellite phones were hampered by heavy cloud cover.
FEMA officials claimed, for example, that because of hampered communications, they didn’t know for days about thousands of people camped out without food or water at the Ernest L. Morial Convention Center. And New Orleanians with working cell phones resorted to Lafayette emergency agencies because calls for help to their own authorities went unanswered.
System outdated
Even before the hurricane did its damage, however, emergency communications in Louisiana were languishing.
Louisiana State Police currently use a decades-old statewide 800 MHz analog wireless communication system. It’s used by 70 Louisiana agencies and 10,000 fee-paying users.
The manufacturer -- Motorola -- no longer manufactures parts or upgrades the technology, and by the end of the year plans to discontinue technical support. It has a capacity of only 46 towers and there’s no space for new users.
At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission -- trying to address growing interference on public safety radio transmissions by Nextel and other cellular operations -- is encouraging law-enforcement to move to 700 MHz.
The new frequency -- once the purview of public television -- has a greater bandwidth to support not only voice interoperability, but data and imagery as well, which would allow agencies to transmit fingerprints, suspect photos, rap sheets, warrants, building blueprints and other critical information into the field.
The downside of switching to a new communication system is the cost.
In a December 2005 letter to the House Select Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Henry Whitehorn estimates Louisiana must spend $553 million for infrastructure and equipment “to achieve true interoperability” -- plus more than $10 million annually to keep it going.
A 2004 U.S. Conference of Mayors Interoperability Survey found that two-thirds of the 192 cities surveyed are using 800 MHz to communicate with other public safety organizations. Just 2 percent were using 700 MHz.
The study also found Louisiana isn’t alone in its predicament. It concluded that in 77 percent of the 192 cities surveyed, police and fire departments could not talk to one another, and in 66 percent of them, police, fire and EMS agencies weren’t interoperable.
“We have what I’ve been calling the intersection of opportunity and necessity,” said Lt. Col. Joey Booth, deputy superintendent of crisis response and special operations for Louisiana State Police.
“We’re got to do something with our system because the vendor won’t support it anymore, and they’re already to the point where some of our gear they won’t repair,” he said. “And we have the opportunity to move into a bandwidth with all our state and local partners to run all of the applications that we need to run.”
State vs. local
But money hasn’t been the only impediment to interoperability. There’s also politics.
A Government Accountability Office report to Congress last month cited a lack of “effective, collaborative, interdisciplinary and intergovernmental planning” as the single greatest barrier to decades-old problems of interoperable communications.
U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker emphasized in his testimony that “no one first-responder group or governmental agency can ‘fix’ the interoperability problems.”
Cash-strapped local law-enforcement agencies vying for their slice of the anti-terrorism funding pie have been suspicious of any state government efforts to control it. As Wiley expressed it, “if we’re not at the table of input, we can’t be surprised later on if the end result doesn’t meet our needs.”
But state authorities have argued true interoperability can develop in Louisiana only if it is coordinated at the state level.
In his December 2005 letter to the House Select Committee, Whitehorn suggests federal authorities give all funding designated for interoperability to the state, provided parishes and cities with 100,000 or more residents are included in the system.
“Compounding the issue of inadequate funding is the grant requirement that local governments receive a minimum of 80 percent of the funds -- coupled with the inability of the state to direct those expenditures,” Whitehorn writes. “By virtue of the grant guidelines, the state cannot control how the local governments spend the grant funds.”
At stake is more than $135 million in Department of Homeland Security funding -- $106 million of which is allocated for equipment purchases. Louisiana State Police currently get 20 percent of that money, with local law-enforcement agencies splitting the rest. That figure could climb even higher post-Hurricane Katrina.
Leonard Kleinpeter, Blanco’s special assistant, said authorities had been working steadily on addressing interoperability, “but it’s been on and off in terms of what was practical, whether there was proper input and where the money’s going to come from and who it’s going to go to. Every one of those things would cause a glitch in the system.”
When the governor appointed the first executive committee in January, however, the tension reached a breaking point. Kleinpeter said the District Attorney’s Association, Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Catherine “Kitty” Kimball and the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association contacted the Governor’s Office to complain.
He scheduled a meeting of federal, state and local authorities to hash it out, and the result was a revamped executive committee with greater local representation.
“It’s not that there were any problems; it’s what I described earlier,” he said. “If you have people on parallel tracks and the communication’s not there, and after all we’re trying to do interoperability and we don’t have everyone involved, by definition that’s not going to work.”
Booth insists Louisiana State Police aren’t making a power play in the interoperability game.
“We want a statewide network. I emphasize statewide because we’re not looking for it to be a state project,” he said. “The state is trying to get the ball rolling and present a table or platform for everyone to come and provide their input.
“The state wants to help with the initiative and make it statewide because we want to make sure there’s connectivity between all the users,” Booth added. “If a firefighter in Shreveport goes to New Orleans to assist in a response, his communication gear will work when he gets to New Orleans and he can talk not only back home to Shreveport but to other responders in New Orleans.”
Booth said key players from the state as well as local first responders already have begun meeting several times a week independently of the pending executive committee to work on interoperability issues.
Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement Executive Director Mike Renatza said he believes the expanded committee -- once it starts meeting -- will alleviate worries on both sides.
“Regardless of what you have heard, I really think this can and will happen,” he said. “It is in all of our collective best interest to accomplish this task. I think the funding barrier can be overcome if we can assemble everyone on this common goal.”
Ready or not
So where does that leave Louisiana’s communications capabilities for the impending storm season?
Kleinpeter said the executive committee’s first task will be to develop a “hybrid interoperability plan” for the southeast Louisiana parishes most affected by the storm.
“If we can’t communicate there,” he said, “we’re in trouble.”
Louisiana State Police persuaded FEMA to issue a $15.9 million no-bid purchase order for a 700 MHz Motorola system — including upgrading 19 communication tower sites in that region. But the system reportedly was in limbo after the federal agency balked at spending $150 million for the handheld radios needed to communicate through the system.
State Police also bought eight ACU-1000 devices which will allow it to bridge -- or patch together -- otherwise incompatible radios, both 700 MHz and 800 MHz.
Blanco’s proposed budget includes $2.8 million of an unexpected windfall of sales tax and gambling revenue to upgrade emergency communications in southwest Louisiana to the 700 MHz system.
As for other regions, Booth said, the agency is urging their first-responder and other entities to purchase communications systems that meet national compatibility standards.
“Are we ready with the grand plan? Absolutely not,” Wiley said. “But the immediate needs are being worked on, and we’re on the right track. The week after Katrina, it was smoke signals. I’m confident it will be better this time.”
What is interoperability?
Interoperability allows public safety agencies (police, fire, EMS) and service agencies (public works, transportation, hospitals) communicate within and across agencies and jurisdictions in real time.