Posted by Karl Dahlquist on March 19, 2001 at 10:53:40:
(I used to live in Seattle, but now live in LA....I saw this article and saw it hadnt been posted yet...)
Local News : Friday, March 16, 2001
Quake revealed flaws in King County's new disaster radio system
By Chris Solomon
Seattle Times staff reporter
In the hours after the Feb. 28 earthquake, the people who needed to talk to each other the most - King County firefighters, police and paramedics - frequently had trouble with the radio system the county bought with disasters in mind.
Those who use the system said the problems did not result in life-endangering delays in responding to incidents, and its operators said the problems are reparable. Yet the snafus could have hampered emergency personnel's ability to help the public had the quake been a true disaster.
"I haven't found a fire chief yet who said, `Hey, we had good communications,' " said Lee Soptich, chief of Eastside Fire & Rescue, which serves more than 100,000 people in East King County. Soptich said the concern was so great about the inability to communicate seamlessly that Eastside Fire & Rescue reverted to its old VHF radios for a few hours
"Communications is the primary consideration during a disaster. If you don't have good communications, very few other things flow well," he said.
The state-of-the-art radio system was intended to enhance communication, not complicate it. Before its installation, agencies such as police departments used UHF or VHF radio frequencies and could not easily talk to one another.
The newer system, which voters approved in a $57 million levy in 1992, allows agencies to stay in touch with their own members and other agencies throughout the county.
More than 13,000 radios around the county, from those for sheriff's deputies to firefighters at Snoqualmie Pass, now have access to an 800-megahertz system.
After the quake, the system was flooded with people trying to talk - three to 10 times the normal amount of traffic depending on the area of the county, according to the system's managers.
Delays resulted. The average time users had to wait to speak was less than one second in most areas, but in a handful of cases the wait was as long as 12 seconds, said Brent Beden, manager of radio-communications services for King County, including police and fire communications in South King County.
In essence, the troubles began because the computerized system performed exactly as designed, said Alan Komenski, operations manager for the Eastside Public Safety Communications Agency.
When a police officer pushes a button on the radio and speaks, the computer finds an idle spot on a channel and holds it for the transmission.
The computer also ranks potential users by priority. When the channels are temporarily full, the computer puts those who want to talk on a waiting list, gives them a "bonk" - a sort of busy signal - and then sounds another tone when there is room to talk.
In their day-to-day work, police and other users rarely get a busy signal. Many thought the system was overwhelmed or perhaps broken down.
"Choke points" that had been inadvertently built into the system's structure also made it harder for users within the same area to talk to one another, Komenski said.
"I was one of the first ones waving my hands and yelling that the radio system didn't work," said Jean Best, communications operations manager for the King County Sheriff's Office. "Even the best tool can be ineffective if people don't know precisely how to use it."
While the confusion did not result in life-threatening delays in going to emergencies, said those interviewed, they agreed that the experience was a gift - a chance to work out kinks in the system without lives in the balance.
Managers who were already re-examining the radio system said they will likely tweak its structure and reprogram radios over the next year or so.
Training people how to communicate properly over the radio, especially in an emergency, and reminding them of what Beden called "radio discipline" is under way in some agencies.
"After the earthquake, the biggest problem was people getting on the radio and seeing if it worked," he said. "We had policemen getting on the radio and saying, `Hey, was that an earthquake?' "