Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Blackout Hurt Some Police Communications

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 05:16:22 -0400

Updated: 08-18-2003 09:19:29 AM

Blackout Hurt Some Police Communications

NEW YORK (AP) -- The blackout that snarled phones across eight states also
temporarily crippled some police communications, leaving firefighters in New York
out of contact for as long as 14 minutes and forcing Detroit's 911 dispatchers to
ferry handwritten messages to officers on the street.

The problems Thursday weren't critical and officials said no 911 calls from the
public were completely lost. But New York City's mayor said the city will
investigate.  ``We've got to make sure that doesn't happen again,'' Mayor Michael
Bloomberg said Sunday. ``Any delay, any outage is unacceptable with a system like
911.''

The three extended New York disruptions - of 14, 11 and 7 minutes - cut off normal
communication between dispatchers and emergency personnel, said fire department
spokesman Mike Loughran.  Loughran said the fire department, which dispatches
emergency services, has a backup system that could relay calls directly over
hand-held radios if necessary.
In Detroit, the computer-assisted dispatch system normally used by operators to
record the calls and dispatch the appropriate personnel went down, said Jamaine
Dickens, a spokesman for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

The Detroit operators were left to write out the details of the calls on paper and
distribute the information by hand to police, fire and emergency medical service
dispatchers, but there appeared to be little impact on the response, Dickens
said.  ``There wasn't a delay at all because we had so many resources on the
street and we were able to communicate with them and they could respond
immediately,'' he said.

The New York disruptions were caused by the failure of a backup diesel generator
at the Verizon Communications office that supplies power to the city's 911
headquarters, company spokesman John Bonomo said.  The police department also
experienced some limited problems with its hand-held radios in the early hours of
the blackout when batteries for repeaters, which boost the signal between radios,
ran down sooner than expected, a city official told The Associated Press on
condition of anonymity.

The department responded to 90,000 calls Thursday, three times the normal number.
On Sunday, nine police precincts still had problems connecting to the department's
main computer system, stemming from disruptions with cable modem connections.
Emergency workers elsewhere in the blackout zone also reported minor equipment
problems, particularly with computers in vehicles, cell phones and lag time
between the power loss and emergency generators kicking in.

In Ottawa, Canada, some police officers said they had trouble communicating with
their dispatchers through cell phones and on-board computers and were forced to
use pay phones, the Ottawa Citizen reported.  In Bridgeport, Conn., a patrol
officer said one of the police department's buildings was down for a short time
before its generator kicked in. However, governor's spokesman John Wiltse said
state commissioners reported no problems with any of the ``public service
answering points.''
In New Jersey, the police radio room in Paterson lost power temporarily, forcing
the department to switch to a back-up, low-intensity frequency to dispatch
officers, The Bergen Record reported.

Overall, though, New Jersey State Police Sgt. Kevin Rehmann said, the outage
appeared to have little impact on emergency responses.  ``All State Police
stations - and I would suspect it's the case for most others - have back-up
generators to protect their radios and other communication systems,'' Rehmann
said. ``All in all, I think everything worked well... other than the
inconvenience.''

 http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/article.jsp?id=sectionId=46&id=17221

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