Attached please find an article which appeared in the Portland (Oregon) Oregonian news paper very recently. This article outlines some problems which are being enountered in the PDX metropolitan area.
I am wondering if the Seattle/King County area has experienced similar problems, and if so, will we eventually find ourselves with a while elephant which we will either have to discard or pour millions of additional dollars into to make it work properly. It may also be that we DON'T have any problems with our system.
The article states:
OSHA fines Portland for radio failures
The city plans to appeal the $3,600 state citation of its emergency radio dispatch system, which serves many agencies
Wednesday, August 16, 2000--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian staff
The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division has fined the city of Portland $3,600 for failures in its emergency radio dispatch system.
Inspectors classified as serious five violations in which Portland police officers were unable to call for cover on their hand-held portable radios, unable to communicate with fellow officers responding to a call or unable to contact a dispatcher when stopping a suspect.
A complaint from Portland police Sgt. Lonn Sweeney prompted state inspections in April and June, and the fine was issued this summer. Sweeney had sent numerous memos detailing the problems to the Portland Police Bureau and its chiefs during the past five years. He said he filed the complaint because he never got a response.
The city will challenge the citation.
"We're going to appeal," said Mike Palmer, loss control manager for the Portland Police Bureau.
More than 80 jurisdictions in the metro area use Portland's $8.5 million, 800-megahertz radio system, manufactured by Motorola and operating since 1994. Agencies connected to the system include the Portland Police and Fire bureaus, Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, Tri-Met police, Portland school police, Port of Portland, Gresham police, Troutdale police, Fairview police, area ambulance companies and hospitals.
OR-OSHA, in its citation, identified three shortcomings that the city has not addressed and that demonstrate the system does not work effectively.
The first shortcoming it identified was not making the orange emergency button on officers' hand-held radios operational. The city purchased a radio system that would allow officers to press one button in case of an emergency, but it never has programmed the system for use.
The button would immediately override any other radio talk. Now, officers sometimes are forced to wait to speak or
must switch to another frequency if someone is already speaking on the radio. If an officer was shot and wounded, for example, one press of the emergency button would alert dispatchers that the officer needed immediate help.
The city argues that a policy decision was made not to use the emergency buttons because they might be activated accidentally, lock other channels from use and interfere with dispatch.
"The radio is essential in an 'officer down' situation. Since they have the technology, we want it to be as reliable as it can be. But the question is, how reliable can it be?" said Nancy Jesuale, director of the communications division in the city's Office of Management and Finance. "I think some of the officers believe this stuff is designed to be bulletproof. But as a technologist, I know that's not the case. "
The second shortcoming OR-OSHA cited was not ensuring that officers have adequate radio communication capability in all areas of Portland.
The agency found that officers hit airwave black holes in certain parts of the city, preventing them from calling for cover or contacting other officers in their districts because of inadequate radio signal strength. Officers have found that when they press their radios to talk in some areas, the radio just makes a honking noise.
"Everybody has had a radio get honked, and you can't get through. You have to keep trying and retrying," Central Precinct Officer Mike Davis said.
"And sometimes you can't do that anymore because you're involved in a struggle with a suspect. You keep hoping that somebody heard you. Sometimes you have to physically drive to another area to make contact. It's been going on for years, and nobody takes accountability for it."
The city acknowledges that there's inadequate coverage in certain areas, namely in the Parkrose area and the far eastern part of the city, heading out to the Columbia River Gorge and east county.
The city's communications division continues to conduct engineering analyses to find a solution, Jesuale said. The radio system now operates by using signal towers at four main sites.
Sweeney, who filed the complaint, said the city's explanation is unacceptable.
"The city is leaving all these coppers, firefighters and citizens hanging on the line," Sweeney said.
The third shortcoming OR-OSHA identified was failing to expand the system sufficiently to keep it from becoming overloaded as new users were added to it.
When the system was installed, only a handful of Portland bureaus used it. In the past six years, the number of radio users has snowballed to include seven Portland bureaus and 80 outside agencies. The customers are in a region that spans from Lake Oswego to Clark County, and from Hillsboro to Gresham. This, the agency found, has caused an overloading of radio frequencies that sometimes leads to loss of contact between dispatch and officers.
The city disputes the finding, contending the system can handle the expansion of users. "The system has a lot of excess capacity," Jesuale said.
OR-OSHA also fined the city for not holding monthly safety committee meetings for the six months before the inspection. But Palmer said there were only two months when the meetings were not held because officers were unavailable, either out on disability or vacation leave.
"Our records don't support their claim," Palmer said