Interoperable Communications Progressing, but Gaps Remain, IWCE Told

The response to Hurricane Laura, which plowed through east Texas and Louisiana Thursday, shows the importance of cooperation among different agencies and states, said Todd Early, Texas Department of Public Safety assistant chief-infrastructure operations. “In the current situation that we’re in, with Hurricane Laura, there’s been some really great interaction and coordination between Texas and Louisiana … to really ensure coordination, that our responders who are on the ground as we speak, had the ability to communicate,” he said.

“Relationship building” is critical, Early said. “Relationships, during times like this, really help you build the contacts and the ability to get things done very quickly,” he said. His department stresses the importance of listening to local agencies and including what they need in communications plans, Early said. The state is still assessing the extent of damage from the storm, though Texas wasn’t hit as hard as Louisiana, he said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Emergency Communications has spent more than a decade focusing on communications interoperability, said Chris Essid, regional supervisor. DHS seeks “maximum stakeholder participation” including federal, state and local agencies, he said. Initially the focus was mostly land-mobile radio, he said. “LMR is still there,” but the ecosystem now includes broadband, 911 and next-generation 911, wireless alerts and warnings, he said: “There’s so many technologies that we have today that we didn’t have when we started,” he said.

Each state has a statewide communications interoperability plan, Essid said. “That’s what we use as the state priorities to see where we can offer assistance with our programs and services,” he said: “That keeps us stakeholder driven.” The national emergency communications plan is in its third version and “we base it a lot in what is in the statewide plans,” he said. Since the first plan was launched, the focus of the national plan has changed “radically,” he said. The new plan has a whole section on cybersecurity, he said. “We weren’t even talking about that in 2008” with the initial plan, Essid said. As everyone migrates from legacy systems to IP-based systems, security is a “huge” concern for public safety, he said.

“Fed used to be a bad word to a lot of folks,” said Jason Karp, principal at the Public Safety Network. “It was not always well received to have feds involved,” but that has changed for local agencies, he said. The shift has been “very positive,” he said. Karp, formerly at FirstNet, noted the authority met with more than 2 million first responders. “We weren’t particularly well received when we walked into some of those conference rooms,” he said: “It was a matter of building trust” and trying to understand local needs, he said. “There’s “a much better partnership at all levels of government,” he said. With changes like the launch of FirstNet and NG-911 “you have to have that communications,” he said. “We’re going to see more and more nationalized approaches,” he said: “I advise and encourage everyone at the local level to ... make their needs known.”

Divisions remain , said Dan Munsey, fire chief in San Bernardino County, California. “There’s still a great deal of skepticism,” he said: “When it comes to technology and public safety, we only have one chance to get it right.” When the national system fails, “people give up and go back to what they know, to the radio,” he said. Munsey was on site helping manage a wildfire just outside Los Angeles this week. “My cellphone didn’t work, my iPads didn’t work and this radio didn’t work either,” he said. The only option was satellite-based communications.

Munsey, chair of a national firefighter association tech committee, “gets frustrated” by agencies that want to adopt local solutions. These work “99%” of the time, he said. “When we need to come together during the hurricanes, the floods, the tornadoes, the wild-land fires and all the other natural disasters that are occurring, we don’t have the ability to communicate well with each other, to share data,” he said. In managing wildfires, first responders still use a paper map, he said: “Every day, we’re coming in, and we’re writing on paper what we did.”