Communication Problems (Orange County)

[RWC130 594]

We can't move mountains, harried 911 officials claim

By Nathan Hegedus

Times Herald-Record

nhegedus@th-record.com

Chester – Five years after Orange County opened a high-tech E-911 center, its radio signals remain unreliable, causing delays in emergency responses to medical scenes.

Last week, the Chester Volunteer Ambulance Corps missed call after call - five in just a couple of days - as paid EMS workers responded from stations outside of town.

The county did little to address the problem, according to Douglas DiBlasi, a lieutenant in Chester. One official told DiBlasi that Chester could return to private dispatching if it didn't like county service, he said.

In Chester, home to the county's E-911 center, and Blooming Grove, where dead spots are a long-standing problem, both ambulance corps have started using Nextel equipment, hybrids of cell phones and walkie-talkies, to circumvent county pagers.

"We fax incident reports to the 911 center. I have no idea what they do with them," said Wayne Schutz, chairman of the board of directors of the Blooming Grove Ambulance Corps.

The initial transition to a countywide system was filled with radio dead spots and turf battles. The county commissioned a study, applied for more radio frequencies and is working to upgrade its radio towers.

So the complaints frustrate Virginia Panzarella, commissioner of emergency communications. She called the Chester complaints "just politics."

Radio simply cannot cover the entire county, she said.

"If we get 95 percent coverage, 95 percent of the time, that's excellent," she said, referring to a national professional standard.

But that still leaves a lot of room for error, she said. The volunteers need to understand the county can't fix everything.

"We go up and we go down," she said of Orange County's hilly terrain. "Radio does not get through a mountain. But we never want anyone to get hurt. We take it very seriously."

In the past decade, Ulster and Sullivan counties also made the switch to some sort of county-wide 911 system.

Both counties have plenty of hills. In Ulster County, as a person heads west on Route 28 into the Catskills, radio communication is "near impossible," said Bruce Kirkpatrick, Ulster County's deputy director of emergency communications. So Ulster has dispatchers in Sullivan County, and even Delaware County, cover some areas.

Kirkpatrick said that though he can't move mountains out of the way, he tries to solve problems quickly. "That's my job," he said.

Sullivan went to the county-wide system in 2000. There are some dead spots, but only in the least-inhabited parts of the county, not in the population centers, said David Kimmel, Sullivan's 911 coordinator.

In Chester, Orange County switched the ambulance corps to another radio tower. Panzarella said there will simply be different dead spots now.

DiBlasi said his coverage has improved, but he's still not happy.

"If they take [dispatching] over, they should go into it full force and not go into it half-assed, like they did," he said.

NOTE: Doug DiBlasi is a former Empress EMT now Captain of Chester VAC. GO DOUG! =D>