YORK, Pa. -- Four York County fire departments will team up with Maryland to use more than $200,000 from a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to pay for portable and mobile radios to help them communicate, according to a news release.
FEMA said Friday that Shrewsbury Volunteer Fire Company was awarded $264,950 to purchase the radios, along with Rose Fire Company in New Freedom, Glen Rock Hose and Ladder Company, and Eureka Fire Company in Stewartstown.
The money is part of a $1,482,836 grant under FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to several Pennsylvania fire departments for operations, safety and vehicle acquisition, according to the release.
Shrewsbury's Fire Chief Tony Myers said the four departments met last year to discuss the need for new P25 digital Motorola radios that will function on the radio system for Baltimore, Hartford and Carroll counties in Maryland.
In 2011, 9 percent of Shrewsbury's fire calls were in Maryland, Myers said.
"We couldn't come up with a way to get the York radios to work in Maryland to an acceptable level," he added.
York County radios can't function when they are too far from the system towers, and the coverage was spotty, Myers said.
After Maryland upgraded its radio system earlier this year, a temporary fix was used, but the York County departments needed the radios, Myers said.
He hopes that once the paperwork is completed, the departments will have 46 portables and 10 mobiles within a month or two.
Once the radios arrive, he said, the departments will carry two radios -- one for York and one for Maryland. Once they get a call, Myers said, they let York County 911 know the department won't be available, and all communication is with Maryland once they arrive on scene.
"The ability to be able to talk to each other was the bottom line," Myers said.
Radio issues
Last year, responders in southwestern York County were left in silence at emergency scenes several times, after the county failed to patch together radios from York, Adams and Carroll counties. That's a problem that was to be fixed in the spring of 2011.
And it was fixed, county spokesman Carl Lindquist said in January.
But the incident commander at two recent scenes, Pleasant Hill Volunteer Fire Company Chief Ted Clousher, wondered about the continued safety of his firefighters.
The emergency radio system has caused concern -- particularly in southwestern York County -- since its installation in 2009, with responders complaining of dropped calls and pages. The county installed two signal-boosting towers in the fall of 2010 that helped, but December brought concerns over radio patching problems. In several instances, the attempt at a three-county radio patch -- involving Carroll County, Md. -- crashed that part of the system.
Lindquist said recently that such an outage is "unacceptable," but he added that all systems go down from time to time.
Copyright 2012 - York Daily Record, Pa.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
