Va. improves emergency communication in years after 9/11

List of World Trade Center Victims

Eight years after staring into the smoking inferno of the Pentagon, Virginia State Police Superintendent W. Steven Flaherty still is trying to solve one of the biggest problems faced that day -- rescuers who couldn't talk to one another.

At the Pentagon in Arlington County and the World Trade Center in New York City, heroic efforts were made by firefighters, police and rescue workers who weren't always able to communicate because they used different radio systems.

Arlington firefighters lent one of their radios to firefighters from Washington so they could talk while fighting the blaze caused when an airliner was crashed by terrorists into the heart of America's military establishment.

Solving that communications problem -- called "interoperability" in the emergency-management world -- has been one of Virginia's biggest success stories since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as well as one of the state's biggest continuing challenges.

While Virginia was first among the states to adopt a strategic plan to address the problem, the state still is struggling to finish a radio system that state police and 20 other state agencies will use to talk to one another and, eventually, local first responders.

"It is a police officer safety issue," Flaherty said of problems that have plagued the Statewide Agencies Radio System, or STARS, a five-year, $360 million project that is 15 months behind schedule and struggling to remain within its budget.

The problems have included laptop computers that shut off at high speed because of interference from the electronic fuel system in troopers' new vehicles; digital radios that turned talk to robotic gibberish when signals weakened; and delays in building microwave towers necessary to make the new system work.

At one point, state police ordered Motorola Corp., which had gotten the primary contract, to stop installing radios in patrol cars.

"Clearly, the troopers were skeptical," said Col. Wayne M. Huggins, executive director of the Virginia State Police Association and a former state police superintendent, who led a commission created by then-Gov. Jim Gilmore to examine the state's preparedness after the 2001 attacks.

A new statewide radio system was a top priority of the commission, though an inflated $600 million price tag made it a tough sell.

The state is confident it has overcome most of the problems with the new system, which now is operating in the Richmond and Hampton Roads regions.

Fourteen localities in central Virginia and 32 statewide also are able to connect to the system through COMLINC, an Internet-based technology that allows different radio systems to talk to one another.

The state auditor of public accounts is preparing an audit of the system for release this fall to follow up on concerns his office raised this year about the system's reliability, completion schedule and cost, which is financed with revenue bonds backed by a tax on rental vehicles.

"They're in the process of renegotiating and resizing part of the contract" with Motorola, state Auditor of Public Accounts Walter J. Kucharski said.

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Local police also continue to struggle with the emergency-communications challenge in some parts of the state, such as the Blacksburg area, where a different kind of terrorist struck on April 16, 2007, in the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history.

When student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students at Virginia Tech and then himself, police and other rescuers confronted some of the same problems faced at the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

"Frustrating communications issues and barriers occurred during the incident," said a panel appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to investigate the massacre. "Every service operated on different radio frequencies, making dispatch, interagency and medical communications difficult."

The panel, led by another former state police superintendent, W. Gerald Massengill, concluded: "Local political entities must get past their inability to reach consensus and assure interoperability of their communications systems."

It hasn't happened yet in Blacksburg, where town police and Virginia Tech police continue to communicate on different emergency radio bands.

But the police departments are able to patch through communications with each other in an emergency. And the town and university are part of a pair of major efforts to consolidate emergency 911 dispatch centers in the region and eventually create a common radio band for all the localities, including Montgomery County, Christiansburg and possibly Radford, as well as Radford University.

"It's not cheap . . . but in the long run, you'll save money in each locality by not buying six sets of equipment," said Lt. D.J. Davis in the police services division of the Blacksburg Police Department.

Improving the interoperability of emergency communications has been a top priority of Virginia since the Sept. 11 attacks. Emergency communications have accounted for about one-third of $268 million in federal homeland-security grants the state has received since 2003. (That total does not include about $330 million spent in Northern Virginia and the rest of the Washington region, or spending on bioterrorism and hospital readiness.)

Virginia set up an oversight system to coordinate grants to local governments for buying emergency communications equipment. The state hired an interoperability coordinator, Christopher Essid, who since has become director of emergency communications for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Virginia also created a State Interoperability Executive Committee to award grants that ensure localities buy equipment that is compatible, if not identical.

"We are confident that Virginia has been and remains a leader in expanding communications interoperability," said Robert P. Crouch Jr., assistant to the governor for commonwealth preparedness. "That does not mean we are all the way there."

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One of the remaining challenges is improving communications between colleges and the localities around them.

"In Virginia, there is an identified gap in interoperability between local first-responder communications systems and college and university systems across the commonwealth," said Constance McGeorge, the state's interoperability coordinator.

One reason for the gap is that colleges and universities haven't been eligible for homeland-security grants, except for two years when state officials were able to divert a small amount of money to public institutions.

"That's tough to get," said University of Richmond Police Chief Robert Dillard. "That money is not trickling down to us."

But Dillard's police force is tied into the emergency communication systems for Henrico County and Richmond, which both dispatched officers to the campus last year when a young man with a pellet gun and an odd disguise prompted a four-hour campus lockdown.

Similarly, Virginia Commonwealth University is part of the city's emergency communications system, and Virginia Union University is scheduled to be added soon. Chesterfield County has direct communications with police at Virginia State University in Ettrick.

Localities in the Richmond area have used homeland-security grants to bolster their communication systems. Hanover County, for example, used to be unable to communicate with police, fire and rescue crews in some other localities, but now the county has an 800-megahertz system that Chesterfield's deputy director of emergency management, Curt M. Nellis, called "the latest and greatest" technology.

The view is much the same in Hampton Roads, where Norfolk Emergency Management Coordinator Ron Keys said all localities, as well as Old Dominion and Norfolk State universities, are able to communicate in emergencies. "We are light years ahead of where we were," he said.

And in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia is part of the same emergency plan and communications system as the city and Albemarle County. "That's total interoperability for 25 public-safety agencies over 788 square miles," Charlottesville Fire Chief Charles Werner said.

Aside from buying equipment, however, local fire chiefs and emergency officials say the biggest change has been in the culture of local public-safety agencies.

"We needed to talk to each other and change the way we do business," Werner said. "For decades, it was 'I have my radio system and you have yours' and never shall they meet."

As a result, homeland-security initiatives have forced local officials to represent a regional interest and not just their own, Nellis said in Chesterfield. "Regional collaboration is strong and healthy in central Virginia."

Contact Michael Martz at (804) 649-6964 or .