Subject: [NEXTEL-1] US Communities Receive Federal Grants for Emergency Response Communications

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 00:59:14 -0400

US Communities Receive Federal Grants for Emergency Response Communications
Greg Flakus
Sioux City, Iowa
07 Oct 2003, 21:38 UTC

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has awarded 17
grants to local communities around the United States to improve
emergency communications systems. One such grant, for $6
million, went to Sioux City, Iowa. The idea is to not only prepare
for possible terrorist acts, but to improve emergency response for
a wide variety of disasters.

In the Woodbury County
communications center in downtown
Sioux City, operators take in
hundreds of calls every day and
dispatch police, fire and medical
teams to various parts of the
northwest Iowa county. But
sometimes there are emergencies of
a large scale, such as tornados, that
affect not only Sioux City but nearby
communities across the Missouri
river to the west, in the state of
Nebraska, and across the Big Sioux River, to the northwest, in the
state of South Dakota.

But Woodbury County Communications Director Glenn Sedivy
says emergency response communication in this tri-state area is
not what it should be.

"We are dealing with a wide range of
communications frequencies.
Nebraska and South Dakota use low
band, UHF, high band…," he said.
"We even have ioperablity problems
between our own agencies. The
sheriff cannot talk to the Sioux City
police department. The police
cannot talk to the deputies, let alone
getting across the state lines."

Mr. Sedivy says police and other
emergency responders have to utilize telephones to talk to their
counterparts in the other states. It is not hard to imagine an
emergency that would cause a breakdown in the phone system,
making a better tri-state communication system extremely
important. That is where the six million dollars from Homeland
Security comes in.

Department spokesman Don Jacks, speaking to VOA from his
Washington office, says the grants are part of a nationwide effort
to improve emergency response communications.

"It was vital that the Department of Homeland Security look at
the status of emergency operations centers and the ability to
communicate across the country," he said. "As such, about $79
million was made available in the emergency operations center
grant area and also in the interoperability grant area and
jurisdictions were invited to write grant proposals."

Mr. Jacks says the grant money will help communities like Sioux
City react more efficiently and effectively to natural disasters,
accidents and even acts of terrorism.

Woodbury County, Iowa's Director
of Emergency Services, Gary Brown,
has had firsthand experience with a
variety of disasters. He was in
charge of rescue operations when a
passenger plane crashed in Sioux
City in 1989. One hundred 12 people
died in that accident, but, thanks
largely to the effective emergency
response in Sioux City, with backup
help from Nebraska and South
Dakota, 184 people survived. It is
this kind of cooperation that Mr. Brown says makes his city an
ideal place to try new emergency systems.

"That was a model and it continues to be a model for emergency
planning and response," he said. "We still get inquiries from
around the world about what we did that day and how we did it.
[Also] We had the Terra-Nitrogen explosion in 1994, it killed four
people and injured eight as well as releasing several tons of
chemicals into the environment. Again that was a tri-state
response."

Mr. Brown says the Homeland Security grant will allow his office
to utilize new technology to connect radio systems from all three
states and various police and fire departments in each
community. In addition, he says, the new system can be plugged
into the existing Iowa Communications Network, or ICN, to
expand its range. "Iowa is the only state in the union with a
complete fiber-optic network statewide," he said. "We are
actually going to take public safety communications and put it on
that ICN and send it to where we want to send it in the state of
Iowa. That is part of this demonstration project, is to be able to
take public safety communications, push-to-talk walkie-talkies
[radios] into the field and transmit that data over the Iowa
Communications Network all the way across the state. The
beauty of that is that once we get to the state emergency
operations center, the world is available to us. From there they
can connect us to experts, technical experts around the globe."

Mr. Brown says part of the idea behind the Homeland Security
grant is to develop a model system that can be replicated in other
communities. He says he expects to have many visitors from
other cities and states once the new communications network is
fully functional. The grant money must be committed for
spending within a year, but officials are still not certain how long
it will take to set up the new communications system.

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=3E5AB222-58C3-497D-9C22F12334F5BD45

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