Picture a perfect world — well, not perfect exactly; let's say there's enough imperfection around to cause fires. But that single flaw aside, imagine a world where all of the firefighters arriving at an incident could talk loudly and clearly to each other.

Even deep in the fireground, firefighters who can't see two feet ahead could know exactly what's supposed to be in the building through heads-up visor displays that show a computer-generated image of every floor. Plus, all the apparatus arrive in time to fight the fire effectively, because each vehicle has in it an accurate digital map that was sent from the communications center to a ruggedized laptop.

As we used to say to our parents on long car trips, are we there yet? Well, no. Should we even be headed there? Or are there some other places we should head first?

Advances from adversity

Last year's terrorist attacks gave a boost to the visibility of wireless communications in general, and to fireground communications in particular. Federal grants are available to state and local governments to improve their communications systems, and new wireless applications have been announced by some unlikely developers.

Consider, for instance, the “tooth phone,” under development by Barry Mersky, a dentist from Bethesda, Md. The phone is a two-way wireless communications device fitted to a dental retainer. Earlier this year, Mersky showed his invention to the Homeland Security and Defense Symposium in Atlantic City, N.J. Mersky hopes to market his invention to first responders who work in high-noise environments. Reportedly, the device converts vibrations of the teeth into voice signals that can be heard in the 100dB range. Mersky told reporters the device would probably cost $200 per unit.

The same trade show featured the First Responder, a modified Chevy Suburban SUV capable of assuring interoperability between fire, police and emergency medical services at an emergency scene. Raytheon developed the vehicle, which reportedly sells for $225,000.

“There's a lot of really cool technology out there,” says Billy Goldfeder, a battalion chief in the Loveland-Symmes (Ohio) Fire Department near Cincinnati. “But a lot of it doesn't really work very well.”

Goldfeder's fireground communications sights are set a bit lower than issuing firefighters tooth phones or SUV-based communications centers. He just wants to be able to talk to his firefighters at the fireground, clearly and reliably, every time. His pet peeve is with people who purchase communications systems for fire departments and then deploy them without testing them fully.

Personally, Goldfeder leans toward old-fashioned, analog communications systems that work all the time. He is skeptical about digital technology, and most of the new wireless communications products are digital. “I'm told it's a work in progress,” he says. “Work in progress? Why the hell are you giving me a work in progress? We're firefighters.”

For Goldfeder, voice is the key application, and it has to work every time. Firefighters expect rigs to start every time there's a fire, Goldfeder reasons. Why expect less from wireless communications equipment?

Goldfeder's own department has Nextel wireless phones for “command conversations,” plus 800MHZ digital portable radios “that work fairly well,” backed up with 154MHZ analog radios. “We can switch between analog and digital,” Goldfeder says. “But when do you do it?”

Worst-case scenario

Goldfeder's bad dream runs like this: Firefighters arrive on scene with their radios in digital mode, able to communicate with each other and their dispatcher. However, as they set to work, they find themselves fading out on each other, and their incident commander instructs them to switch to analog mode. The dispatcher, still digital, is now out of the loop, but the firefighters can speak clearly to each other. All goes well as long as … well, as long as all goes well.

At this point the firefighters can talk to each other, but they can't always see each other. In some smoky corner of the burning building, a firefighter finds himself in real trouble and doesn't have time to say, “Hey, I'm in trouble! Help!” He also isn't entirely sure where he is, and neither his comrades nor his commander are sure, either. He hits the panic button on his radio, but because he's in analog mode and the button is digital, no one hears him.

If he has the presence of mind to return to digital mode, the dispatcher may hear him. But how will the dispatcher get in touch with the firefighters at the scene, who are still in analog mode? The endangered firefighter may be left to rely on the strength of his own voice, calling for help in what Raytheon would call a “high-noise environment.”

“I've heard that exact scenario,” says John Anderson, senior safety manager for public safety and major accounts at Kenwood Communications Corp., in Newberry Park, Calif., a major supplier of wireless communications equipment to fire departments.

“There are solutions to that problem,” Anderson says, noting that the problem is not between analog and digital technology, but with the proper installation of the system backing up a department's portable radios.

“If the radio system is not reliable, the solution is a mobile repeater in the fire truck, close to the building,” Anderson says. “[Firefighters] can communicate with the truck and then out to the dispatch center reliably.”

Cool, but at a cost

Stephen Adler of Motorola says that plenty of new technology, including the heads-up displays referred to earlier, is commercially available, but that the fire service has not kept pace with the emergency medical service in deploying it.

“There was a lot of money available in federal grants, beginning in the 1970s and running into the early 1980s, and the medical side took full advantage of it,” he says. “The fire service lagged a bit behind, at least in this country.”

Steven Foley, senior fire service safety specialist at the National Fire Protection Association, in Quincy, Mass., thinks Adler overestimates the technological gap between the fire and emergency medical services, pointing out that, in most large American cities, the two services are part of the same bureaucracy and often use the same communications equipment and network.

However, Foley concedes that fire departments in the United States are behind European countries. For example, that same heads-up display technology is available and in use in many parts of Europe.

“My friends in the Strathclyde Fire Brigade in Scotland have that capacity now in their apparatus, and it gives them a complete picture of the building,” Foley says. “A lot of that is available from the building department.”

The technology may be available, but there still are technical barriers to its deployment. For example, mapping information can be downloaded to a laptop in the responding vehicle to help firefighters locate the right address or to a firefighter's heads-up display to help him find his way around the building.

Speed and cost are at issue, however. The fact that the data exists on paper or in a computer database doesn't mean that making it available will be easy, or cheap.

“The technology is there, but the speed of moving the data is rather slow,” says Denny Blaine, executive vice president of sales and marketing at E.F. Johnson & Co., based in Waseca, Minn. “We're trying to push all the data out to a fire apparatus, but trying to push all that down to the apparatus might take as long as getting to the fire itself.

“It's also costly. You need receiving equipment, screens and so on, to boost the data. It's costly for them (fire departments) to upgrade their equipment. The other thing is, sometimes building mapping is a fairly new technology, and not all commercial buildings would be mapped in an area.”

Fiefdom borders

When Foley goes out to a Strathclyde pub for a pint with the lads, they have trouble believing that, in the United States, the firefighters can't always talk to the police, or the neighboring department, or even to each other. But Foley has no trouble believing it. That's there, he explains, and this is here.

“The United Kingdom fire service is pretty regimented, and it's a national system,” he says. “They have national standards, and there's no deviation. Here in the States, people go out and do what they want without thinking about the big picture. Doing things with your neighboring fire department, well, you should be able to talk to them. It's not a technical issue; it's a fiefdom issue.”

There are jurisdictional issues that tug wireless communications back and forth across state and county lines, and across bureaucratic boundaries as well. A report compiled for New York City by management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and published over the summer revealed that New York's fire and police departments couldn't always talk to each other at incidents.

In addition, the report pointed out that only about 10% of New York City's 2,000 high-rise buildings (buildings more than seven stories high) were equipped with repeaters to aid radio signals up and down the building. The World Trade Center towers, completed in the mid-1970s, were not among them.

The terrorist attacks of last September have made it easier to see the big picture, but there has been an effort under way for years to encourage a unified national standard for emergency services communication called Project 25.

Project 25, the international joint effort of the mobile communications industry and public safety officials to set interoperability standards, has received a boost in public visibility during the past year. Since 1989, it has provided the arena in which technical arguments have been thrashed out, and its executive director, Craig Jorgensen, has predicted that its standards may be ready in 2004.

Like all communications standards efforts, Project 25 suffers from its sheer size and from the scope and complexity of its work. Its goal is to “promote the design, manufacture, the evolution and the universal and effective use of technologies stemming from the APCO/NAST/FED Project 25 process.” All three major mobile and portable radio vendors — Kenwood, Motorola and E.F. Johnson — and many smaller vendors, are involved in the process. But some are more enthusiastic than others. After all, what happens to a manufacturer that commits to build Project 25 equipment and networks if the standard becomes outdated?

Nonetheless, Motorola offers an entire set of wireless network equipment for emergency services, and all of the units are compatible with Project 25. And IBM recently announced its intention to build a public safety wireless data network that will allow more than 40 local, state and federal agencies in the Washington, D.C., area to communicate via real-time messaging.

Planning issues

Goldfeder says it's a good idea to be interoperable with other agencies and neighboring departments, but he doesn't think such a goal is as easily attainable in the United States as it was, apparently, in Europe. He's not sure that national standards would be a panacea, either.

“We're the United States, and that doesn't make us great or wonderful or better or worse, but by our nature, we're independent,” he says. “European governments are much more into central purchasing, much more consolidated. I would say that bigger is not necessarily better, and consolidation can lead to large bureaucracy.”

NFPA's Foley points out that interoperable does not necessarily mean transparent. “A lot of people talk about interoperability, but I can tell you that the FBI or the Secret Service doesn't want Joe Firefighter on their encrypted radio,” Foley says.

Goldfeder thinks that wireless communications fail on the fireground because the people responsible for purchasing the equipment pay too much attention to the technology or a seemingly attractive price for the equipment, and not enough attention to simple, common-sense things like testing. “Just crummy planning on the part of the people who build the systems,” he says.

Surprisingly, at least one vendor agrees with Goldfeder. An executive with a major vendor, who asked that neither he nor his firm be identified, says that having firefighters switch back and forth between digital and analog modes is a bad idea; a network, he says, should be one thing or the other.

“There is a direct system, or radio to radio, and a wide-area system, which is repeaters on hilltops and buildings,” the executive says. “Imagine a fireman inside a building transmitting out 50 yards to the truck or to other firemen in the building. That's direct. The breakdown we're describing is a fireman trying to transmit on the wide-area system, trying to hit a repeater on a hilltop 20 miles away.”

The answer, the executive says, is to consider the system as a whole, to build more repeaters closer together and to train firefighters thoroughly in the use of their equipment. With a well — thought-out mix of repeaters (including mobile ones) and rugged radios, firefighters wouldn't have to remember which mode they were in.

Of megahertz and moolah

There are two resources whose availability may have a great deal to say about how fire departments communicate in the future: spectrum and money.

Foley points out that the Federal Communications Commission, late last year, opened the 700MHZ band for use by emergency services. “That will be a big window of opportunity for the public safety community,” Foley says.

The other resource, money, may be more of a problem. For example, as it tries to improve the communications capability of its emergency services and address the issues raised in the McKinsey report, New York City will probably have less money with which to do so this year. A sluggish national economy and the damage the terrorist attacks perpetrated on the city's own economy has Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city council talking about tax hikes and budget shortfalls. New York's experience is not unique.

And what about firefighters in the rest of the country? Foley points out that 80% of the fire departments in the United States serve 5,000 or fewer people. Many of those departments are staffed by volunteers who must find the money to keep their training and equipment up to date. They find it in municipal and county budgets, such state and federal grants as they can scare up, pancake breakfasts, and bingo.

“A lot of those departments struggle to keep up their apparatus and stuff,” Foley says. “USFA grants are available for communications equipment. This year, there was $300 million in FIRE Act grant money. The proposal is to raise it to $900 million. That's a drop in the bucket. Law enforcement gets $33 billion.”

For Goldfeder, the main priority is straightforward: to be able to communicate clearly and reliably on the fireground. Once on the fireground, he doesn't much care whether his communications technology is analog or digital, where the money to buy it came from or how far apart the repeaters are. For him, the question is the one asked partly in jest by the tv commercial for a wireless telecom company: “Can you hear me now?”

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Ken Branson is a freelance writer.

Will headsets help?

Dan Soulier doesn't miss much. But there's a lot he doesn't hear.

“I have certifiably lost 68% [hearing] in my left ear and 54 in my right, related to the job,” says Soulier, deputy chief of administration in the Harrisburg (Pa.) Fire Department. “I have lost the middle range, where normal conversation goes on. It got so that I'd go out to dinner with my family, and I'd have trouble hearing what my children were saying, but silverware clanging at the next table was like nails on a chalkboard.”

Soulier got hearing aids a couple of years ago “and now, I'm hearing things I haven't heard in years,” he says. He believes his younger colleagues will save their hearing and do their jobs better because they use headsets to communicate.

Harrisburg incident commanders, pump operators, truck operators and rooftop firefighters wear headsets. These headsets permit the firefighters to talk to each other and to their commanders, and to hear each other, without having to pick through extraneous noise. Soulier is surprised that more departments don't use them.

“My typical picture of an incident commander is of (someone) with the lapel mike up to his ear, using the antenna (of the portable radio) as a pointer,” Soulier says.

Not surprisingly, a similar image is in the minds of people who make and sell headsets and intercoms. Their pitch to fire departments is that headsets, attached to mobile or portable radios, are a relatively easy way to make sure that orders are clearly understood, that the right questions find the right answers, and that incident commanders, truck and pump operators can hear their colleagues speak and themselves think. Otherwise, they contend, everyone at a fire scene is reduced to shouting, cranking up the volume on his or her radio, and straining to hear through the static — all in vain.

“Turn the volume of the speaker up, and you just add noise,” says Gary Stamm, northeast regional sales manager for David Clark Co. of Worcester, Mass., which makes headsets, intercoms and adapters.

A headset might be attached by a cord to a mobile radio in a truck, or it might be attached by an adapter to a portable radio carried by a firefighter. The headset has two big ear cups, or domes, and a microphone protruding from one of the domes to the firefighter's mouth.

Will Antunes, corporate sales manager for FireCom Inc., in Portland, Ore., has a clear idea of who should use his company's products.

“On-scene safety officers, incident commanders, etc. trying to hear the radio properly,” Antunes says. “They're keeping an ear open to hear people trying to call them. Meanwhile, people are walking up and shouting to them, there are sirens going, and the fire itself makes a lot of noise. A lot of those problems can be solved with a simple headset. It cuts out high-frequency noise by about 24dB.”

Antunes, Stamm and their competitors run into some resistance from potential customers.

“In the industry, there's often machismo that says, ‘Oh, well, it's loud, but we're big boys and we can handle it,’” Antunes says. “There's great apathy for hearing protection…. Largely it's gone unnoticed.”

Stamm finds that many departments have other priorities.

“I think in a lot of cases they still feel that headsets and intercoms are luxury items, rather than necessities, and also they would rather have their trucks adorned with embellishments — more lights and chrome bells and that sort of thing,” he says.

Stamm is reminded of his main obstacle when he approaches a potential client at a trade show. “The typical scenario is, you'll speak to some older [firefighter] at a fire show, and he'll say, ‘Huh?’”