Commissioners seeking costs for 911 Communication Center expert review
The Dubois County Commissioners approved seeking requests for proposals from two recommended firms to examine the county’s 911 and radio communications system.
The decision comes after a special meeting involving Commissioner Larry Vollmer, several county department heads and all of the county’s fire chiefs was held in March with Robert Zickler. Zickler is Homeland Security Advisor for the Indianapolis Department of Public Safety recommended by the State Fire Marshals office to assist in the review of the county’s communications system. He provided his report to the count at no charge.
The commissioners requested the overview of the system be conducted after the tornado warning failure in Birdseye on January 30 and upon numerous complaints about communications from volunteer fire department personnel in the county.
Those complaints and concerns consist of several issues involving communications between the 911 Communications Center and fire and emergency personnel.
The fire department provided Zickler with several issues and concerns, including one that came in to play on the night of the January 30 siren failure. That night the siren was unable to be activated due to an alert on the same frequency warning the communications center of tornado warning for Dubois County.
In fact the communications center has several systems using the same frequency. Those include the fire department paging, fire department communications, EMS paging, and warning siren activation. As in the case of the tornado siren activation, this causes issues when one service is using the channel and the other services are locked out (e.g. when a tornado warning is issued the channel is tied up for about one minute and 45 seconds during the page to the sirens).
The group has also expressed concerns about dead spots in areas throughout the county and has requested cellular phone texts be used in addition to the paging system for the fire departments.
Other items mentioned were spotty communications between vehicles and lightning strikes taking down the emergency repeater.
Zickler stated in a draft of the report to the commissioners that he observed a level of discomfort between the county emergency service personnel (fire fighters and ems) and the communications system due to the lack of progress towards solutions for what are persistent communications issues.
Despite this discomfort, he stated the performance of the emergency services is still at an acceptable level for the community as the emergency personnel use work-arounds in the communications system to operate.
Zickler recommended the county hire a consultant to develop a five-year plan to bring the county’s 911 Communication Center up to standards of “the national public safety broadband network, next GEN 911 initiatives, enhanced public emergency alerting systems, multi-platform personnel alert and paging and a resilient, reliable radio/cellular public safety voice/data communications platform.”
He highly recommended the 911 Communications Center adopt a computer aided dispatch system similar to the system all of the county’s police departments switched to in 2012.
Commissioner Vollmer stated he is taking Zickler’s recommendation seriously. “There is definitely some problems, enough so that Zickler recommended we have one of these two firms examine the system and develop a plan.”
The commissioners approved requesting proposals from two companies Zickler recommended to examine the 911 Communications Center, fire department communications, highway department communications, ambulance communications and Dubois County Emergency Management communications systems and make recommendations for improvements.
Those proposals will be reviewed at the first commissioners meeting in May.
There should be a pretty easy solution, at least as far as the warning sirens go. One of two things I can think of off the top of my head is either an additional FCC licensed frequency for warning siren use only, or the county could use a trunked radio system. I don’t see why warning sirens should take up a minute and a half of radio airtime. If nothing else, send the signal with a time period attached to the carrier signal in order to sound the sirens in a short radio burst. It really shouldn’t take more than 10 to 15 seconds to send the signal. But, maybe I’m just missing something. However, those sound like cost effective and quick ways to sound the alarm.
I should clarify “send the signal with a time period attached”. What I’m trying to say is that if the siren(s) should sound for, say, 3 minutes, the signal sent could be quite short, essentially consisting of two or three basic commands: (1) Turn on siren, (2) wait 3 minutes, (3) turn off siren. The signal could be sent in as little as little as a few bytes. Then, have the sirens send back a small acknowledgement of receiving the information, and you should be good to go.
One other option I just thought of: use leased data lines (i.e. ISDN or T-1 lines) from the phone company. Not real cheap, but it could be reasonable depending upon up front costs of any other proposed solutions.
Ultimately, I guess my issue with all of this is that it really isn’t rocket science. Why do we really need to do another costly study? Does the county have no civil/electrical/computer engineers who could come up with a reliable solution? How do other counties do it? Would they not be willing to share how they do things? I might be oversimplifying, but it doesn’t sound like a terribly difficult thing to get your wireless voice and data traffic in check. There are tons of technologies available, and, believe it or not, there are people in Dubois County who could build a system from the ground up, and that includes fixing what we already have.