Interoperability Article

Responders can communicate

(from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Tuesday, August 22, 2006)

Virginia was the first state to create a plan for ensuring that everyone who must respond to an emergency has the equipment to talk to one another. That was one of the biggest shortcomings in the response to the attack on the Pentagon in 2001.

The state also was the first to hire an interoperability coordinator, whose job is to make sure that localities spend money on communications equipment that will work with what other localities and the state use.

“It’s 90 percent coordination and 10 percent technology,” said the former coordinator, Chris Essid, who is part of the Office of Commonwealth Preparedness. “They might have bought a radio for $3,000, and it won’t work with the $3,000 radio bought in the next county.”

Essid has created an executive advisory council that includes police chiefs, sheriffs, fire chiefs, emergency-services administrators, city and county officials, and representatives of key state agencies, such as the state police. They make decisions about where to spend federal grant money.

The program has gotten about $2.7 million in homeland-security grants that it has distributed for local and regional projects to improve emergency communications. And not all of the money the localities have received shows up on the spreadsheet for homeland-security spending in Virginia.

For example, Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-10th, helped secure almost $1.8 million in budget earmarks to pay for improvements in interoperability. The Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services gave $6 million to Virginia Beach in 2004, and $1.4 million to Lynchburg and $866,000 to Roanoke last year, to improve their systems.

Still, state officials say much needs to be done. “Interoperability, for me, is still not there,” said William H. Leighty, chief of staff to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and a former Marine Corps radio operator.

 

# # #