System links county’s emergency agencies

This year, Clermont County, Ohio, will complete installation of a communications system that will link the county’s emergency operations. The $15 million system will include voice, data and paging components, and enhance coordination of agencies during emergency response.

Comprising 470 square miles, Clermont County is home to 180,000 people in 14 townships, 12 villages and two cities. The region is dotted with remote hills and valleys along the Ohio River and far-flung rural areas to the northeast of Cincinnati. That terrain not only hampers communications between emergency personnel, but also produces “dead spots,” where communication is impossible.

A string of natural disasters, beginning in 1987, convinced Clermont County officials to begin planning for a shared public safety communications system. “That year, we almost lost a firefighter because we couldn’t tell him to get down off a burning hill,” says Clermont County Commissioner Martha Dorsey. “During the wildfires that swept parts of the county, emergency personnel not only battled winds and flames, but they had to battle to communicate.”

Ten years later, a devastating flood and then a powerful tornado hit the county. The flood, in particular, required a rapid, coordinated, multi-agency response, which was not possible, says Beth Nevel, director of the county’s public safety services. “Many of our emergency units were unreachable by radio,” she explains. “We also had 20 units trying to talk on the same channel at the same time. We had no common frequencies or talk groups that would enable firefighters, police officers or people from outside the county to communicate and coordinate emergency resources.”

In 1999, the county hired Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola to design and install a new communications system. With input from 27 of its public safety agencies, the county had defined what it needed for data capture, processing and storage, and those requirements were incorporated into the design.

The system components will be integrated in phases over the next year. They include a five-channel, 800 Megahertz, mixed-mode, digital simulcast, trunked radio system; a single-channel, wireless data system; and an alphanumeric paging system. Additionally, the county is purchasing 1,500 mobile and portable radios; nearly 200 mobile data terminals; and more than 1,500 pagers.

The trunking system provides the communications backbone for the entire county, and it can be expanded and upgraded as needed. It allows agencies to communicate privately as they respond to day-to-day calls for service and communicate in pre-determined talk groups to coordinate emergency response.

Already, the county’s police, fire, EMS, public works and transit departments have been added to the voice system, and public safety personnel for the cities will be added next. By this spring, the wireless mobile data system will be installed, allowing law enforcement officers to create and file incident reports, access databases and receive reports from a terminal mounted in their vehicles. “This communications capability not only reduces our public safety response time, but also enhances officer safety because we can relay information to them immediately,” Nevel says.

In the future, the county plans to add a global positioning capability that will further enhance response. “County dispatchers will be able to advise departments of road detours, blacktopping projects, anything that interferes with the timely response of emergency units,” says Clermont County Administrator Steve Wharton.

The new communications system was tested extensively last September, and, according to Wharton, provides the county with 99 percent coverage. “The real proof will come with our next emergency,” Dorsey says. “But, now, all the different public safety services involved will have a clear, effective way of communicating with each other when the time comes, making it safer for everyone involved.”