By Dave Gustafson
Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)
Copyright 2006 Charleston Newspapers
Kanawha County public safety officials gathered at the state Capitol Wednesday to celebrate a new era in cooperative emergency communications in the county and the state.
Within a month, every public safety agency in the county will get at least one of the 164 digital radios to communicate with each other during emergencies as part of the statewide Interoperable Radio Project.
The radios, which cost at least $1,400 apiece, eventually will replace less powerful ones carried by police, firefighters and EMS and found in emergency vehicles.
They will improve communications for first responders, whose well-known communication problems led to confusion during responses to the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.
“The one clear lesson of Katrina and 9/11, was the failure of us, government, to give you the basic tools to talk to each other in simple, efficient ways,” County Commission President Kent Carper said to the dozens of emergency officials.
Emergency officials must now determine how they want different agencies to communicate now that they can all speak to one another.
They will set up “talk groups” to let ambulance drivers talk to firefighters or allow neighboring police departments to better coordinate their response to a high-speed pursuit that crosses jurisdictions, said Charleston firefighter Dave Erwin, who is in charge of implementing the radio project.
Erwin said the radio he is replacing would not have worked inside the state Capitol where the ceremony was held - a big liability when firefighters inside a building need to hear an evacuation order.
Instead, the new digital radios open up communication in places first responders could only dream of, he said.
For instance, much of the state Capitol Complex now has radio coverage. The same goes for many rural areas of the county.
The only place Erwin has had trouble communicating is in the elevator shaft of the second basement of the former Diamond department store building in downtown Charleston.
The new radios also have an emergency button. Instead of yelling for help over the radio, police officers and firefighters could hold it down for 3 seconds to alert Metro 911 dispatchers that they are in peril. Dispatchers won’t be able to tell their location, but will know which person is in trouble.
At the ceremony, Erwin showed off the long-distance capabilities of his radio by contacting Dr. William Ramsey of the state Department of Health and Human Resources, who played a major part in building the statewide radio system, who was in a building in Martinsburg in the Eastern Panhandle.
At a meeting in Charleston last week, Erwin contacted the West Virginia University Medical Command Center in Morgantown.
Kanawha County’s portion of the statewide plan to improve emergency communications follows a similar $10 million communications project in Monongalia, Marion and Harrison counties that was funded by a federal grant.
State Military Affairs and Public Safety Secretary James Spears said the Interoperable Radio Project is in its fifth year and has cost $35.5 million, mostly from federal homeland security grants.
The state’s most populous regions from Huntington to Charleston to Morgantown are mostly covered by the new radio system, but 11 more towers are planned throughout the state to provide total coverage, he said.
Local emergency agencies will phase in the new radios over several years as funds become available, Erwin said.