Public Safety Hinges on Communications
#22 EMERGENCY RESPONSE
Communication is the key to any emergency response network. Just ask police and fire rescue teams in New York, who fought through communication gaps as they responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center.
It’s sobering to consider that the City of Los Angeles’ emergency response network covers an area more than 20 times the size of Manhattan. Or that the 17-member staff of L.A.’s Emergency Preparedness Department must coordinate information among 14 agencies.
As it stands, L.A.’s police and fire departments cannot talk to each other in the field during emergencies. And in a post-9/11 world, unifying emergency communications must be a top priority.
To improve communications, the city must implement new technologies that would fuse information channels between emergency service agencies in the field.
Officials within the local response network acknowledge the need for inter-operability, but disagreements on how it should work are holding up progress. The LAPD, for example, is reluctant to create a network where information and tactics conveyed between police units can be compromised by outside sources. Currently, the police department is focused mainly on increasing existing bandwidth to deliver video feeds to its patrol cars.
The fire department, which stands the most to gain from inter-operability because of its interaction with many emergency teams, recently convened a meeting of other agencies, including harbor, police and airports, to press the issue.
The agencies discussed funding a study that would determine costs for updating emergency communications. But no study will proceed until each agency has defined its inter-operability requirements.
It’s not as if no one recognized the need for standardized emergency communications before the events of 9/11. Back in 1991, devastating fires in the hills above Oakland rendered Bay Area fire agencies effectively useless due to variations in hose-hydrant hook-ups. A statewide standardization rule was passed, covering emergency response systems and structures. Cities that disregard it won’t receive state or federal emergency funding.
While Los Angeles, like most other cities, complies with this rule, there are glaring weaknesses in its system.
L.A.’s current emergency response network was set up nearly 25 years ago, but training and planning had lagged by the time of the 1992 riots due to budget and staffing issues. Recovery, response and preparations were overseen by a board of emergency managers chaired by the chief of police.
After the riots, the city funded a full-time team that did not reach its stride until after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Former Mayor Richard Riordan created a task force in 1995 to better organize emergency preparedness. When L.A. adopted a new City Charter in 2000, the mayor’s office was granted authority over the emergency response network and the Emergency Preparedness Department was born virtually unchanged in staff and scope from its predecessor a few years earlier.
There has been some progress. Voice, radio and mobile data transmission systems for police and fire departments have been upgraded at a cost of more than $186 million. Yet analog-based wireless communications systems, while effective within each agency, are incompatible between departments.
In addition, radio frequencies used by emergency response teams in the field are parceled out by the Federal Communications Commission according to city so despite their common borders, emergency workers in Los Angeles cannot link up with those in neighboring Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood or Burbank. This posed significant problems during the 1992 riots, when violence spread across city limits.
Tony Turgeon, chief executive of Van Nuys-based TechnoConcepts, a developer of wireless systems for consumer and military users, says the technology isn’t yet available to replace L.A.’s 17,000 mobile handsets with digital devices. In addition, base stations would need to be upgraded at a price of $5,000 each.
In the short term, the city can install hundreds of repeaters that make it possible to link the agencies at a cost of about $2,000 each.
But over the long term, consideration should be given to reinforce mountaintop radio transmission sites, which are vulnerable to attacks, with the purchase of satellite time. The costs could be partially offset by sharing use of the network with nearby municipalities, linked by a common response network.
EMERGENCY RESPONSE
Proposal: Unify communications across the emergency response network
Obstacles: Agencies locked into
non-compatible analog technology
Cost: Minimum of $2 million; could be higher depending on scope of project
Time Frame: Two to three years
