Thanks to a multi-million dollar grant from the federal government, local emergency officials will no longer be relegated to responding to emergencies in a piecemeal manner because of incompatible communications equipment.
Last Thursday, the United States Department of Homeland Security awarded the regional Emergency Communications Center, which represents Albemarle County, Charlottesville and University public safety agencies, a $6 million dollar grant that will aid in funding a new 800-megahertz emergency radio system. The system will serve all three jurisdictions in a combined manner.
Regional officials competed against 53 other communities from around the country in an effort to acquire the grant money, according to Charlottesville Deputy Fire Chief Charles Werner, who was responsible for drafting the grant proposal.
The Charlottesville region's communication plan was selected as the best out of the 54 submitted, Werner said, adding that only 17 of the plans submitted received partial funding, and Charlottesville's was one of only five that received the full $6 million in grant money.
Werner said public safety officials in each jurisdiction currently are unable to communicate with each other effectively because they all use different equipment.
"Our present situation is that we are, for the most part, using different radio systems and they are different radio frequencies, which don't allow us to communicate with one another," Werner said.
Charlottesville City Manager Gary O'Connell, who sits on the ECC board, said the new radio system will allow for unimpeded and instantaneous communication between all three local jurisdictions.
"It's like a big puzzle and we're trying to connect all the pieces together" with the new system, O'Connell said. "Emergencies don't know boundaries. They don't know when you leave the city of Charlottesville and go into Albemarle County."
Of the funds awarded, $4.5 million will go toward the new radio system's total $18 million cost, and $1.5 million will go toward enhanced communications technologies that were viewed as financially out of reach before the grant was won, Werner said.
Werner suggested the new technology could allow for anything from the monitoring of a hazardous material sites via a wireless smart camera at a central command location to firefighters viewing the floor plan of a building they are about to enter on a laptop computer before arriving on the scene.
The grant allows for a Nextel wireless phone interface with the new radio system, which will extend an official's ability to be 100 percent interoperable with just about any agency, he said.
"Now biological [terrorism] is an issue," he said. "Before we didn't need to have such communication capabilities with health departments, but we do now."
Local officials recognized a weak communications infrastructure in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, O'Connell said.
"Looking at 9/11, where our biggest issues are, we probably thought communications was the biggest one we were vulnerable in."
Now, however, the Charlottesville area has the opportunity to become a model for its support of an integrated communications infrastructure comprised of emergency workers and new technology, said Leonard Sandridge, an ECC member and University executive vice president and chief operating officer.
"I think that, first of all, the system this will support is a state of the art system," Sandridge said. "In addition to that, there are few communities where the emergency workers to include fire, rescue, police, environmental health and safety and medical are as well coordinated and work as effectively together as they do in this area and for that reason I think this will prove to be a model from a technological perspective, but also a model from an implementation perspective."
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