York, PA Radios fail from lighting strike

[ab3a]

Radios glitch at lightning-sparked fire - The York Daily Record

From the article:

"Firefighters who responded to the scene of an East Manchester Township blaze Wednesday afternoon encountered communication problems.

Chief Ryan Brenneman with Eagle Fire Company in Mount Wolf said they lost radio communication while about six firefighters were inside the home in the 900 block of Second Street.

And Brenneman said, as the incident commander, he had trouble communicating with York County 911 -- even though he was standing outside the scene of the fire, in the middle of a street.

"This is just the latest problem in a long series of problems. ...If we can't communicate with our firefighters, it's a safety issue for us," Brenneman said."

... more at the link

 

[RocketNJ]

Another reason they should be using a direct channel for fireground.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.600 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

The title is VERY misleading, they failed due to poor coverage at a fire started by a lightning strike, not because of a lightning strike...

 

[RocketNJ]

It doesn't make it clear if fireground was being run on a repeated system or if it was only dispatch to IC communications that was affected.

I sure hope they don't run FG through the radio system infrastructure.

 

[P25_GURU]

Its amazing how a Chief who was a dispatcher, involved on the Radio Committee, set up all of the areas in his district to be coverage tested can FORGET that he has a large area of poor coverage..(along the river bank, Shear cliffs)

Ryan must have had a large brain fart or a desire to be in the newspaper again for something he knew from day one... He has even instructed his crews to switch to talkaround when in the saginaw area of his district..

York county's system works a LOT better than what was asked for or bought.. Out of 900+ square miles of county, there is maybe 5 miles total that are poor... At a cool million a site to fill 5 sparcley spaced areas, its much safer to switch the radio to talkaround and communicate... York's QRT (quik Responce Team, SWAT) uses talkaround encrytped all the time at every scene they work..

A question for the cheifs on here... if you are entering a KNOWN dead area, would you have your crews switch to talkaround while enroute, BEFORE gear up?.. Seems logical to me...

RYAN.. Quit WHINING or move to Hanover with the other whiners..

73 to all and to all a good night

 

[PetervonB]

Misleading Title

I would suggest the administrator pull the title of this thread which says: "York, PA Radios fail from lighting[sic] strike".
The lightning struck the house. There is no indication that the lightning did anything to the radio system.
- That is not to say that the flaky digital computerized stuff they have out there isn't more susceptible to lightning strikes. I wouldn't trust it myself.

 

[Tommahawk]

As a former YCDES 911 Dispatcher, and a user of a P25 system elsewhere, this particular county system has been a pain in the buttocks. I don't know who has engineered this system, but 95% portable coverage versus 95% mobile coverage is two different beasts.... York County does not play nicely with other counties surrounding it. Thats all I will say.

Oh yeah, my opinion as a member of the Public Safety world is that the York County system pretty much sucks through and through!! I have seen people standing within line of site of a tower and not being able to get through.... Sorta kinda like the Open Scam system that the state insists is working...

Oh yeah about the radio system... If I recall correctly, other counties have offered space on their tower sites across the river to enhance any and all coverage, and York County pretty much snubbed them off........... I mean you can literally see Three Mile Island out of your backdoor in Mount Wolf...

 

[phillmobile]

Another reason they should be using a direct channel for fireground.

in the uk all fireground comms are simplex and are analouge radios