“They promised that this would never happen.”
Issue 1. Trusting "they" and not having an independent review.
Issue 2. Using the term "never".
“We couldn’t talk to each other,” he said.
Issue 4. Lack of planning and training.
Issue 5. For pete's sake, the guys a Battalion Chief, he should understand the technology he is using and be able to adapt to failures.
"Once they determined the radios were out, crews were called on their cellphones and told to switch over to the old VHF radio system, which works on line of sight, said Schaeffer."
Issue 6. "Old VHF radio system" should be referred to as "back up system" or "contingency plan".
"But the station alerting system also went off line, which meant that crews were dispatched using pagers. They knew an address and the type of call, but nothing else. Dispatchers usually relay details about the patient and/or the location, Schaeffer said."
Issue 7. For the love of God, please tell me that they still have wireline telephones in the stations, or did some beancounter get rid of those, too?
Issue 8. No backup system? No wireline fall back? No backup repeaters? If this is a trunked system, it should have gone into failsoft mode.
"Experts are flying out to diagnose the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again, Knezovich said."
Issue 9. Relying on "experts" that have to be "flown out". Not having local resources is a failure.
Issue 10. "make sure it doesn't happen again". This exact failure might not happen again, but a failure WILL happen again. Thinking that a system is failure proof shows a complete lack of understanding of technology and failure to train radio users to have a fall back plan.
"“We were promised that there was no way there would ever be a single point failure, which happened last night,” he said"
Issue 11. The single point of failure seems to be a combination of lack of training and foolish politicians that buy this line of tripe. There is ALWAYS a single point of failure. It's called the user. There is often a secondary point of failure. It's called the vendor.
"“They’re not supposed to do that.”"
Issue 12. Famous last words.
"...and they will be working to come up with a plan in case there are future outages."
Issue 13. Closing the barn doors after the cows get out. This should have been planned out before the system went live.
What's annoying here is that politicians will spend taxpayer dollars on whatever the vendors tell them to. There is no local on staff subject matter expert that can act as a resource, they'll just trust the vendor, who will tell them whatever they want to hear to get the money.
Failure to understand the tools that the first responders are using, and not having a backup plan that users are trained on ahead of time is a major disconnect.
I know, it's easy to Monday morning quarterback these things, but when it keeps happen time after time and it become apparent that we are not learning from our mistakes, the core issue is a big glaring thing that's hard to ignore.