Communications District to study parish emergency radio plan

The Communications District of St. Tammany wants to make sure all police, fire and other first responders parish wide have the ability to communicate with each other during a major disaster.

To that end, the district’s Board of Commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday to hire a consulting company to help them come up with solutions and costs of such a plan.

The Strategic Communication Interoperability Plan, or SCIP, has been in the works for the past two years by the Communications District. Director Woody Glover said they have been working on the idea since before Hurricane Katrina. However, Katrina made the board realize it was an absolute necessity to have communications between all fire, police and parish agencies during an emergency.

“Katrina helped get things rolling,” Glover said.

The Department of Homeland Security gave the Communications District a grant to come up with SCIP. The Board of Commissioners formed a special committee headed by Glover and Fire District 4 Chief Rick Tassin to find out if such a system is feasible.

Currently, if a police officer in Slidell needs to talk to a police officer in Mandeville, he has to go through the Slidell dispatcher, who can patch the two radios together. The SCIP would take out the dispatcher, and any first responder would just have to flip a switch on his or her radio to talk to any other emergency personnel in the parish.

There are several obstacles to implementing the plan though, and that is why the board decided to hire Tusa Consulting Service in Covington to help the Communications District come up with a plan.

Tusa Consulting Service specializes in designing emergency radio systems and designed the St. Tammany Parish 911 Center.

To implement the plan, everyone should have new, weatherproof radios. To help communications, more radio towers need to be constructed on parish land so the parish doesn’t have to pay rent to lease space on private companies’ towers.

There are some technological snags, too, one of them being the number of radio bands that can be used. Glover said currently, all parish police departments and the Sheriff’s Office use the 800-megahertz bands to communicate.

However, these bands are becoming crowded. Glover said they hope to open up the 700 to 800 megahertz range of bands next year. Those are the bands used by television stations, but after next year, the bands will become vacant because all television stations will broadcast digitally.

Of course, the biggest roadblock to getting the plan off the ground is funding. New radios, towers and repeaters are expensive. Tassin said the district can look into grants to fund the system.

Dominick Tusa of Tusa Consulting Services said designing the system is easier than finding the funding source.

The board voted to have Tusa come up with a needs assessment list and solutions for the system for $49,000, which will be paid with the Homeland Security grant. The agreement is contingent upon agreement between Tusa and Walter Gallinghouse, who designs and maintains the St. Tammany Fire Services radio system on fees and costs.

“This is a heck of an opportunity for bring everybody in the parish together,” Tassin said.

Board Chairman and Mandeville Police Chief Tom Buell agreed, but with reservations.

“I don’t know if we can afford this, but it is a good time to try and do something,” Buell said.