800 mhz system briefly shuts down

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icom1020

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Emergency agencies struggle with outage

This story was published Friday, May 20th, 2005

By Jeff St. John and Nathan Isaacs, Herald staff writers

A power outage Thursday at a remote communications tower near the Oregon border briefly shut down the radio system Mid-Columbia police officers and firefighters use to talk with the 911 dispatch center.

The interruption to the 800 megahertz radio system, however, "did not affect the ability of the public to call 911," said Steve Sautter, spokesman for Benton County Emergency Services, which oversees the dispatch center. "We are not aware of any situations in which we were not able to dispatch first responders to an incident."

Police and fire departments in Kennewick, Prosser, Richland, West Richland were affected as were the Benton County Sheriff's Office and the Benton County fire districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

The system shut down about 8:15 a.m., Sautter said. It was restored within a couple of hours, but radio traffic between the 911 dispatch center and police officers and firefighters didn't resume until after 12:30 p.m.


During the outage, police and firefighters used VHF (very high frequency) radios, cell phones and computers installed in police cars to communicate with each other and with the dispatch center in Richland and the smaller one in Prosser.

Kennewick police set up three mini-dispatch centers -- at the downtown station, the Morain Street fire station and at the Columbia Center mall -- that were staffed by officers who relayed calls from the 911 dispatch center to the 10 officers on patrol.

Kennewick's patrol officers used borrowed VHF radios from Benton Fire District 1, said Kennewick Sgt. Ken Lattin. "This just shows the good partnership between all the emergency agencies," he said.

Police Cpl. Tim Scott dispatched calls at the fire station. "As long as we keep up on the calls, it'll be OK," he said.

Lattin said it was fortunate there were a minimum number of service calls Thursday.

"It's steady, but not crazy," he said. "There was never a time we couldn't respond to calls this morning. It just took a little more time."

Kennewick fire Capt. Nathan Rabe said the department had kept its old radios for use when helping on mutual aid calls with other agencies still not on the 800 megahertz system.

"So when the 800 system goes down, we just switch to the old system," he said. "We're still able to get dispatch information."

Sautter said the cause of the radio system's interruption remains a mystery.

However, a Benton PUD crew was performing scheduled maintenance on a back-up battery at the tower when the electrical power went out, said Karen Miller, PUD spokeswoman. She said the PUD does not supply power to the tower, and the PUD was not responsible for the outage.

A spokesman for Pacific Power, which does supply the power, said the only outages they reported were in the Walla Walla area.

The investigation is expected to continue today. And technicians from Motorola, manufacturer of the system, were expected to come to the Tri-Cities to check why the system failed and to find a way to prevent it from happening again, Sautter said.

It's believed this is the first time the 800 megahertz radio system has gone down for such a long period since becoming available in 1995 in Benton County.

Public safety agencies across the country have switched to the 800 megahertz digital system because it has more capacity and other features than previous radio systems.

That includes allowing agencies from different jurisdictions, as well as different departments within a city, to talk to each other.

Sautter said contingency plans were in place in case the radio system goes down. But that appeared to contradict reports from Kennewick police officials, who said their plan was developed Thursday morning.
 

n4voxgill

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Good chance that this was an electrical problem, not a radio system failure. It used to send fear into my heart when anyone would start to work on the UPS system. We lost our prime site 3 times, all due to backfeed from maintenance people on the UPS.

Losing this site should put the system into fail safe. I wonder if anyone has insturcted the users what to do when this occurs. with the conflicting statements about plans, I suspect they have not.
 

im800mhz

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Failsoft will only work in a simulcast mode if you still have your SDA's and USCI's. If they are gone, due to a power fail, you're SOL. So if the prime site lost all power, it doesn't matter what the remote sites are doing.
 
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