Feb. 12--Officials from two counties who have struggled in recent weeks to meld their emergency radio communications met to talk through a fix for those repeated problems, according to an administrator from one county.
And the hope is spotty 911 radio service in the southwestern corner of York County will soon be only a memory.
Scott Campbell, administrator at the Carroll County, Md. office of public safety, said he met recently with staff from York County's emergency services department to discuss a series of communications problems at Pennsylvania fire scenes over the past two months. In several instances, radios from the two counties have failed to connect at West Manheim Township fires.
Campbell said officials determined in several cases the problem was "a piece of York County equipment" that York County's emergency services director said would subsequently be replaced.
"He was very open in sharing concerns," Campbell said of the York County director, Eric Bistline.
Campbell said the two sides met in Maryland and described the meeting as "excellent" and "very productive." There was no finger-pointing, he said, and staff on both sides had three goals: determine what went wrong, come up with an immediate fix and look for a long-term solution.
The first two of those goals have already been met, Campbell said, with officials confident the relevant issues have been addressed.
"Is the patch ideal right
now? No," he said. "But it's functional, it's serviceable. Our long-term fix would be a more robust or better patch of the systems."
The most recent round of radio issues began on Dec. 3, with a piece of farm equipment that caught fire. In that instance, units from York, Adams and Carroll counties arrived, but found that when a radio "patch" -- or melding of frequencies from several counties onto one channel -- by York County was attempted, the system went down.
On Dec. 28, units responded at about 8 p.m. to a structure fire on Hobart Road, near Ross Road in West Manheim. Again, Hanover-area responders were unable to communicate with each other.
York County spokesman Carl Lindquist said those problems are being investigated, though he declined to go into the specifics of a potential fix. He has said the issues were different from past patching problems.
"Although the problems experienced in West Manheim are an exception to the system's generally strong performance countywide," he said, "we agree with the (township) supervisors that they are unacceptable."
After the December incidents West Manheim's supervisors unanimously approved sending a letter to each member of the York County Board of Commissioners as well as Gov. Tom Corbett and State Fire Commissioner Edward Mann. Copies of the letter, to be mailed in January, were also sent to state Sen. Mike Waugh, R-Shrewsbury, state Rep. Ron Miller, R-Jacobus, Penn Township's board of commissioners and the Hanover Borough Council.
"The problems that exist with this (York County) radio system need to be addressed and corrected -- not next month, or in six months, or next year, but immediately!" the letter from the West Manheim supervisors reads.
The letter also invited York County emergency officials to a future township meeting.
Lindquist said in a Friday email that county officials are planning to attend an upcoming meeting in the township and they look forward to "an open dialogue regarding the performance of the radio system and the inherent challenges associated with trying to mate York County's equipment with the different systems used by other counties."
Details of any such meeting have not yet been ironed out, he said.
Township Manager Kevin Null confirmed that plan, and said officials would likely not be at the supervisors' meeting later this month, for lack of time to organize. One of the two regular township meetings in March seem like a better possibility, he said.
Lindquist said officials will better explain at that meting what's behind the recent problems.
"We plan during our meeting with the board to explain the results of our investigation into these problems and the steps we have taken to remedy them," he said.
Campbell said while there is no future meeting between his staff and York County officials planned, the two sides continue to stay in close contact over the radio issue. Carroll County is expected to switch from analog to digital radios not too far in the future, he said, and that will require more cooperation as the systems are melded together.
There have been no subsequent reports of radio problems in West Manheim Township -- specifically in what Campbell called the "well-defined, focused area" of past problems -- and that's a testament to cooperation and progress, he said. It's emergency officials working together to accomplish the "amazing challenge" of keeping such systems up and running at a high level of efficiency.
"This could have devolved into finger-pointing, but it was the exact opposite," Campbell said of the meeting with York County officials. "The concern wasn't who's at fault, but the important thing was what happened and how to fix it."
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HANOVER-AREA PROBLEMS
Recent 911 problems were far from the first county officials have had with the radio system. Hanover-area responders have long complained about dropped pages and dead spots in southwestern York County.
The problems began around Hanover soon after the $36 million system's installation in the summer of 2009. For more than 18 months local responders complained of missed radio calls and pages, until York County agreed to add two booster towers, on the West Manheim Township water tank and atop Hanover Hospital, in late fall of 2010.
Still the problems continued, with Penn Township Fire Chief Jan Cromer saying failed multicounty radio "patching" in early 2011 was putting the Hanover area's firefighters in danger. County officials attended a packed township meeting soon after to help assuage those fears, saying the system works the overwhelming majority of the time.
More recently, volunteer fire companies missed calls when the county's pager system went down for 90 minutes late last year. And Hanover-area responders also complained after several more patching issues in the West Manheim area in recent months.
Copyright 2012 - The Evening Sun, Hanover, Pa.
