Radio malfunctions pose life-threatening risk [The Hawk Eye, Burlington, Iowa]

(Hawk Eye, The (Burlington, IA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jan. 28--On Nov. 29, the West Burlington Fire Department's radio system went silent.

A malfunctioning signal amplifier caused the department's handheld radios and pagers to shutdown. For one day, no messages were exchanged via radio or pager between the fire department and the countywide dispatch center in Burlington.

"This was 911 for West Burlington," Fire Chief Mike Heim said, holding up his cell phone. "The dispatchers would get the call, they in turn would call me, and I'd have to go to our station to set the tone." Unable to communicate with volunteer firefighters, Heim rallied as many of them as possible to the fire station, where they sat and waited for calls from dispatch.

When the calls did come, the firefighters answered them as usual, but without functional on-scene radios.

Call after call, they responded to fire reports without a way to communicate with one another.

"It's frustrating, and it's scary," Heim said. "You're putting people in harm's way and you're trying to rely on a radio system that may or may not work." It lasted from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Heim said, and for at least a week after, West Burlington and other Des Moines County fire departments could reach dispatch only through a secondary "talk-around" channel.

The talk-around solved the problem of reaching dispatch, but only by circumventing a faulty system that has taken two years and more than $560,000 in federal grant funds and local matches to deploy.

It wasn't the first time county fire departments experienced potentially life-threatening problems due to radio malfunctions.

Adjusting to new radio equipment and infrastructure, when thrown into the mix with a federally mandated switch to narrowband frequencies has created a range of complications for the county's fire and police departments. Not all the problems are the same and not all the departments are suffering equally.

Sitting near an array of radio equipment at West Burlington's City Hall in December, Heim turned up the volume as the tone signaling an incoming call went off. The message, containing the address and other details about an ongoing fire, was indecipherable due to the garbled sound quality and crackling static.

A moment later, Heim's cell phone buzzed.

Lost in transmission Faulty communications have been a persistent problem with the West Burlington Fire Department since the county switched to modern equipment in 2010 and updated radio infrastructure in 2012.

West Burlington's deputy chief of operations, Mike Steward, said he noticed problems with handheld radios during a summer grass fire.

"The guys were less than an eighth of a mile away from me. I could see them line of sight, but couldn't talk to them," he said.

Since then, he's had radio problems at five other fires.

Heim recalled a Dec. 1 incident when West Burlington and Burlington firefighters were unable to communicate with the command post during a second-floor fire in an apartment complex.

The four radios on the scene, for one reason or another, weren't working.

"You don't think it's a safety issue for our personnel " Heim said. "It's not the only time it's happened." Deep within a burning building, fire and smoke can obscure vision.

"You can't see a hand in front of your face," Steward said. "The only communication we have is mouth to ear and mouth to mic. And that's it. There's nothing else. You touch and feel. That's it." Not being able to rely on a radio adds a new dimension of danger. As radio troubles persist, Heim and Steward have become more worried.

"The fear of putting our guys in harm's way, it's very scary," Steward said. "You can walk in with radios working, and two minutes later they don't work." In the event of radio failure as a building is coming down with firefighters inside, Heim said the last attempts at communication are to send in runners or blast the air horns on the fire engines.

Handheld radio communications aren't the only issue.

Scene notifications sent from dispatch by pagers also have proven problematic, with messages dropped frequently enough Heim has instituted Plan B: notifications by text messages.

"There have been times in the last few days where this was the only thing we had," he said, holding his cell phone. "The pagers wouldn't pop at all, but these would." Fire departments throughout Des Moines County have experienced similar problems. In September, Danville Fire Chief Kevin Pierce filed a complaint with the communication center about dropped pages.

"This is causing significant delay in response," he said. "We need to have this fixed immediately." Phase 1: Signal to noise It is unclear what the exact problem is, though it is almost certainly a combination of personnel adjusting to new equipment along with new narrowband frequencies.

Radio communications were so faulty in West Burlington in early December, the fire department wrote a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency requesting a third party diagnose the problem.

Whatever the problem, it likely stems from when local officials decided to modernize the Burlington-based communication center 2 { years ago.

"Our radio vendors were having a hard time finding replacement parts, it was so antiquated," said Burlington Police Maj. Darren Grimshaw, director of the countywide communications center. "Some of the problems we ran into initially were we were trying to integrate brand new technology with 30-year-old legacy equipment, stuff that was meant to operate in an analog world." To transition to a fully modernized system, the county decided to upgrade its radio infrastructure in phases.

Each phase brought a new set of problems.

The first phase was to purchase new equipment: handheld radios, pagers and three base station repeaters to amplify radio signals at a radio tower.

It was funded with a $263,614 FEMA grant sponsored by the West Burlington Fire Department and awarded in 2010. The equipment was purchased from and installed by Graybill Communications of Hiawatha.

With the new equipment and repeater system came new problems, some of which still are being experienced.

For one thing, personnel had to learn to use walkie talkies with a multitude of added functions and modes. The new pager system also was prone to failure.

But apart from modernizing the equipment, Phase One changed how the countywide radio infrastructure worked by switching to a repeater system.

In the old radio system, public safety personnel talking on walkie talkies could speak to one another over short distances and reach dispatch all on one channel. Though simple, the drawback was individuals on opposite ends of the county could not talk over handheld radios.

The introduction of repeaters at each tower site solved the problem by boosting the signal so whatever was said in Burlington could be heard by anyone listening in Mediapolis or Danville.

The problem with the repeaters is a walkie talkie must reach the repeater to transmit a clear signal, even over short distances.

"It's got to go 10 miles and back to talk to a guy standing 50 feet away from you," Grimshaw said.

The result in some instances was poor quality messages being broadcast across the county, and even short-range communications suffered from the upgrade.

Accustomed to being able to talk clearly over a single channel, it took time to adapt.

"They didn't understand completely how the repeater system worked," Grimshaw said. "Those are issues we dealt with." Narrowbanding The challenges presented by the upgrade to a repeater system were worsened by the mandated switch from wideband to narrowband radio frequencies.

With radio spectrums running out of room to accommodate the traffic nationwide, a new range of frequencies was required. The lack of available frequencies on the wideband spectrum sometimes resulted in channels bleeding into one another. Narrowbanding solves the problem.

Simply put, wideband allows for greater range but fewer channels, and narrowband increases channels at the cost of range.

The decreased range of narrowbanding has been problematic throughout the nation.

"In a nutshell, we knew going in narrowbanding was going to create issues. We did not expect it to create as many problems as it did," Grimshaw said.

Des Moines County's topography has made the switch to narrowbanding more problematic than in other Iowa counties.

Communication between a handheld radio and a radio tower relies on line of sight transmission, making radio use more difficult in the river valley.

Phase 2: Resolution Hoping to resolve the problems presented by the upgraded radio infrastructure, Des Moines County's radio committee began studying possible fixes. What emerged was a plan to install six new antennas and to purchase "voters" for the county sheriff's office. Voters are signal amplifiers working in conjunction with the repeater system.

The project is being financed through another $250,000 in FEMA funds. The Burlington Fire Department sponsored the grant awarded in 2012.

Burlington Fire Department Battalion Chief Kenneth Morris, who was instrumental in writing the grant application, said most of the county's radio problems no longer are an issue for his department, but the new antennas and voters will address issues being experienced by West Burlington and other departments.

With the proposed solution comes its own set of challenges. The grant requires the project be completed by March.

"We're running against a timeline here," Morris said, adding he is wary of the project's progress.

The only bid is from Graybill Communications, which provided the equipment and repeater system in 2010. Its bid was $21,000 more than the amount offered by the grant, and the county's fire departments also must meet a 10 percent match for the grant, which means an additional $46,000.

Morris has been negotiating with Graybill to lower the price. Even if it is lowered, Morris said the Burlington Fire Department likely must trim $5,000 from its budget to pay its portion of the local match.

Out of the static The story of the county's struggle to modernize its radio system begins with Paul Barnett.

Barnett, West Burlington Fire Department's division chief of training, spearheaded an effort to upgrade the county's radio systems about eight years ago.

"It was my goal that we not have these problems," he said. "It's been a very long project, and I hoped by now we'd be done." Barnett said he is displeased with Graybill Communications, which has reprogrammed West Burlington's radio equipment five times to no avail.

Heim said the fifth reprogramming in December made the problems worse.

"It's a major safety issue right now," Heim said.

Kevin Graybill of Graybill Communications said most of the problems stem from the mandated switch to narrowbanding, which is beyond his control. The other issue is a need for added training, which he said likely accounts for most of West Burlington's radio problems.

"I'm dealing with some recently reported issues but have not been able to confirm or deny any equipment failure," he said. "All equipment is performing at normal specifications as designed." Barnett and Heim disagree.

Heim has disabled extra functions on his department's portable radios to simplify operation and flatten the learning curve. In his opinion, there's nothing new about the radios, which would require more training.

"The constant equipment failures have been a very sore source of frustration," Barnett said.

Indeed, nearly a decade of work on the radio upgrade project has taken its toll on Barnett, who has ceded some responsibilities to Steward.

"The stress level was getting high, because it's just one issue after another," Barnett said. "It wears on you. I take it very personally. If this system fails at the wrong point in time, someone gets hurt. I work fires with all these guys in this county. One of them getting hurt would really upset me, because I did this to try and be proactive, to upgrade our system." Barnett said his department's letter seeking FEMA help may bring scrutiny, but he is not worried since he has done all he can.

"I'm out of options," he said. "Failure of a radio system is a very serious life safety matter. ... I just want it to be right. How we make it right at this point I don't know. I just want the system to work as we had originally intended, without so many glitches." ___ (c)2013 The Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa) Visit The Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa) at www.thehawkeye.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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