More than just connecting radios

True operational interoperability increasingly relies on data communications to supplement voice, while organizational factors, not technology, are still the most common interoperability roadblock.

Incident dispatchers for the Placer Co. (CA) Sheriff's Department handle communications for a large-scale terrorist exercise from a communications van.

It's been four years since Sept. 11 pushed "interoperability" into the public safety vernacular. As a concept, of course, interoperability has been around for decades, but first responders' critical inability to communicate between different badges and borders became closely entwined with the image of two immense concrete and glass towers crashing into rubble.

Since 9/11, a variety of solutions have been offered to solve the interoperability dilemma, from frequency-patching devices to broad network-based solutions, but problems remain that keep public safety and homeland security agencies from achieving true operational interoperability. To a large extent, emergency response agencies still operate as individual entities. Occasionally, methods exist to connect these agencies during a joint response, but far too often the same problems that kept agencies in New York City from cross-communicating during 9/11 remain.

Katrina's comm conundrums
Among the many disaster management problems that came on the winds of Hurricane Katrina were many of the same kinds of communications problems we've been hearing about for years. Despite some successes, essential communications between local, state and federal agencies were hampered by disparate networks and systems. Even systems that were designed to accommodate interoperability failed after virtually all of the voice and data communication systems went under Katrina's flood­waters.

Firefighters in Shreveport, La., have a radio system that allows them to talk with police, fire and other officials from 50 different agencies in their home turf in northwestern Louisiana, but when they arrived in New Orleans to help after Katrina hit, they were unable to communicate with state police, who use a different type of software in that area.

While progress is being made at the local levels, as in Shreveport, problems remain when local responders need to communicate with federal responders. More than 77% of the 192 cities surveyed for a 2004 report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors said they had communications systems that could operate across police and fire departments, and 65% could operate between police, fire and EMS. However, more than 80% of the cities reported that they did not have two-way radio communications with federal agencies like FEMA.

"I think Katrina was a glaring public display of the inadequacies," says David Aylward, director of comcare, a national nonprofit alliance dedicated to advancing emergency response. "It isn't that the inadequacies weren't known, it's that they hadn't been put up on the public stage so obviously."

"Because of the widespread loss of communications infrastructure in the Hurricane Katrina/Rita areas, progress in advancing interoperability was not very evident," says Harlin McEwen, chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Communications and Technology Committee.

"It is already clear that 'operability' was the bigger issue," he continues, "because much of the ability for public safety to communicate was not working following the storms. The progress toward local and state interoperability with federal agencies has not been significant, and the eventual review of the events will show we need to do a lot more if we are to be prepared for such large catastrophic events."

Continuing challenges
The ongoing lack of progress on operational interoperability, as outlined in a presentation by Virginia's Secretary of Public Safety John Marshall at the 2005 Virginia Interoperability Communications Conference, can be boiled down to five essential elements:

• incompatible and aging communications equipment,
  
• limited and fragmented budget cycles and funding,
  
• limited and fragmented planning and coordination,
  
• limited and fragmented radio spectrum, and
  
• limited equipment standards.
  

The challenge is coming up with working solutions in the midst of a largely disconnected national public safety system and a myriad of vendor-provided solutions.
Technology isn't the issue, as was illustrated by a recent project in San Diego. While it took only 30 days to put the technology in place to improve area-wide communications, it took about two years to get all the agencies (police, fire, federal and others) to agree to the plan, according to DHS interoperability director David Boyd. Even with vendors a-plenty providing a myriad solutions, political and turf issues continue to muddy the interoperability waters.

"Brainstorming on technical solutions is the easy part," says Robert M. Zanger, an advisor with the Justice Department's Wireless Management Office. "It's a bit harder to get people to the table to help raise end-user awareness or to hammer out the agreements and procedures that bring it all together. You need some leaders willing to do the hard work on the planning aspects."

The CommTech program within the National Institute of Justice (DOJ's R&D branch) www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij is facilitating the development of interoperability solutions for both voice and data communications. Joseph Heaps, CommTech program manager in nij's Office of Science and Technology, reiterates that interoperability isn't about all responders being able to talk to each other all the time. Rather, the mission is to help state and local public safety agencies communicate effectively and efficiently with each other across agency and jurisdictional boundaries.

The 25 Cities Project was a response to that realization. Initiated in 2003, the 25 Cities Project identified the nation's top 25 metropolitan areas that were likely targets for attack. To identify gaps and potential solutions, doj gathered data about existing systems and then facilitated the development and implementation of a solution plan.

"With 25 Cities, we either leveraged existing or created new working groups with federal, state and local representation to develop solutions and to craft sops," says doj's Robert Zanger, noting that most of these solutions and groups have taken root and are now self-sustaining.

"One thing 25 Cities has taught me is that interoperability is really a local problem," Zanger adds. "The solutions had to take into account existing resources and, to a certain extent, existing politics. It is important to have the solution be something that is used, ideally, or at least tested, on a regular basis to breed familiarity and awareness."

A locally driven responsibility

Arnie Kestler and Chief Randy Shurston of California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 3 discuss communication protocols during CA-TF3's deployment to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

The DHS Office for Interoperability and Compatibility works with local and state public safety representatives to address communications and interoperability through the Safecom Program , which also coordinates various federal funding programs. Safecom recently released the Statewide Communications Interoperability Planning Method­ology, a result of a collaboration between Safecom and the Commonwealth of Virginia that outlines a step-by-step planning process for developing a locally driven, statewide strategic plan to enhance communications interoperability.

Safecom is also working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to assess whether new two-way radio equipment and systems being made available to local public safety agencies are compatible with the Project 25 interoperability standards from the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International.

Safecom considers the most effective method to be a practitioner-driven approach with the highest priority being on the specific needs of the local agencies, supported and facilitated by state and federal entities. "There [are] few, if any, instances where we or any federal agency could go in and drop a solution. It had to be state-and-local driven," notes Michael Duffy, chief information officer of the Wireless Management Office.

This in turn requires attention and planning at the local levels. Local chiefs and administrators have to take an active role in planning and development, rather than waiting for federal solutions to come down from on high.

"Some people think interoperability means having an icri or an acu-1000 in the closet or a grant-funded command vehicle sitting around," says Capt. Ray Mercer, systems administrator for MedStarOne, an ems provider in Savannah, Ga. "We should make sure that our basic communications plan is solid and in place. Too many disaster plans are just that, ‘plans,' and not working solutions."

"Our most successful solutions arose where local leadership took an active role," says Zanger. "I think we also benefited from what I detect as an ever-increasing understanding of the need for greater federal, state and local coordination and willingness to work together to achieve it."

Networked data interoperability
Data communication is increasingly becoming more significant than voice communication today, if not for immediate first responder interactions, at least for ongoing emergency management. While first responders make the initial coordination at a disaster or terrorist event, local emergency operations centers will be ramping up to manage that incident and coordinate with incoming assisting agencies higher up the disaster management food chain, culminating with FEMA. This requires a comprehensive data flow from the local eoc all the way up to the top levels of federal disaster management.

In 2004, DHS expanded its computer-based counter-terrorism communications network to all 50 states; five territories; Washington, D.C.; and 50 other major urban areas. The Homeland Security Information Network provides interactive data communications between state and authorized local agencies and the DHS Homeland Security Operation Center. The new system expanded DHS's existing Joint Regional Information Exchange System from a law enforcement system into a homeland security–focused network for real-time information-sharing.
"Networks today tend to be single networks, operated by a local agency, so there's very little cross-sharing," says John Delay, director of strategic management/networking business for Harris Corp., a leading worldwide supplier of microwave communications systems.

"One of the things that happened during 9/11 in New York City," he explains, "was that the communications infrastructure, much of which was truncated or originated in the World Trade Center, had no redundancy scenarios built in, whether those redundancies were through their own networks or were across other networks. One of the first problems to solve is how to build multiservice network environments to serve these responders, so that in true disaster situations you start to have interoperability across the agencies."

Delay proposes bridging together one or more networks to create enough redundancy to achieve reliable data interoperability during a disaster. "The single standing communications infrastructure in the New Orleans whole region after Hurricane Katrina was a television station," notes Delay. "There was no emergency responder network; it was down. There was no cellular network; it was down in sporadic areas. But the television overlay infrastructure existed."

Delay suggests that building a hybrid system that would include one or more radio-frequency infrastructures would relieve the kind of overloading on networks that occurs during disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

"What we're working towards right now is the idea where we would essentially bridge together the television infrastructure and a cellular wireless carrier infrastructure for data communications, and the emergency responder network," says Delay. "In that scenario, the probability of all three of those being out is very low, because you have three network infrastructures that are designed for four or five kinds of reliability."

Interoperable redundancy
That kind of redundancy, especially in a disaster environment, requires back-up systems that won't be susceptible to the same event that may take down the primary system.
During Hurricane Katrina, both the primary and secondary dispatch systems in New Orleans went down within hours of the flooding, observes Tom Richey, executive director of homeland security for the Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft.

"If you are susceptible to a natural disaster like the hurricanes, you don't put your back-up system four miles away from your primary," says Richey, noting that one of the only systems that remained standing after Katrina was DHS's Homeland Security Information Network, a Microsoft-based system that was used to coordinate the government response to Katrina. "That system had back-up and continuity capabilities, and it didn't depend on one server in one part of the country."

In addition to hsin, the U.S. Coast Guard operated one of the other systems that remained operable after Katrina. While systems at the Coast Guard's Aviation Command Center in New Orleans were wiped out, back-up systems allowed them to operate seamlessly out of Mobile, Ala. "They were the only federal system that remained running in the first two weeks of Katrina," says Richey, who is also a 22-year Coast Guard veteran.

Operational plans must reflect how diverse agencies will work together during an event.

"There are still cultural divides between disciplines," notes Chief Charles Werner of the Charlottesville (Va.) Fire Department, past chair of Virginia's State Interoperability Executive Committee. "We need to work very hard on relationship-building and true public safety partnerships. Potential solutions will continue to involve the evolution of new technology through the use of software-defined radios, broadband communications, information technology for disaster management, etc. But none of this can be accomplished without sound policies, procedures, training and drills involving all public safety agencies."

"Our largest challenge is to sit down to the table together," says Mercer. "The evidence is clearly present that the technology exists to bridge these gaps in communications. Good, basic system planning may be our best bet for an across-the-board solution to the future of interoperable communications."