Interoperability And You

911, what is the address of the emergency?

Oh, my, what fun. Yep, that's one of the big buzzwords up there in the title.

Interoperability.

Sixteen years ago today, it wasn't a word anyone knew. After the attacks of 9/11, it was the word to know in the public safety world. Being able to talk to each other was a hard lesson, learned in the hardest of ways. Around the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, agencies couldn't talk to each other. NYPD, FDNY, PAPD, DCFEMS, DCPD, and on and on... all were working on their own frequencies, in their own bands.

Over the last decade and a half, any public safety agency doing a radio upgrade has had to work interoperability into it... and that brings some sweet sweet federal money into the pot. At a previous agency I worked for, we upgraded from a multi-site UHF system to a multi-tower trunked digital 800MHz system... and it was amazing. Talk across the county on a handheld? Absolutely!

Unfortunately, like many agencies, we took the approach of "We can, so we should." Talk groups were "free", so let's make dozens of them. Let's have the bus drivers talking to the police talking to the plow drivers talking to the fire department ... etc.

It took a year or two of constant pushback from the people actually using the system on a daily basis to get things back to manageable. The ability to talk between groups was still there, but it was at least a little more discreet.

And then, last week, with my current agency, I went to a multi-agency tabletop exercise. I went as a COM-L, and it was eye-opening. We collected a portable radio from each agency in attendance and started mapping out the interagency talk groups they had available. We ignored the "local" channels, which was good - one of the agencies there had over 800 talk groups programmed into their walkie-talkies.

Eight. Hundred. Every interop channel in the state was in those radios, plus several in the cross-border area.

After we worked out our communications plan, we went back to the group setting and went through an exercise critique. The point was made by another COM-L that field units needed to know how to get their radio to the correct channel, or having all these wonderful interop channels was kind of pointless.

A gentleman with brass on his collar on the far side of the room piped up and said, "No, that's what we've got you for. We hand you the radio and say 'find it'."

I looked around the room and decided to retort... "Sir, with respect, no. That doesn't work. Look around in this room. There are fifty of you and five communication folks here. You will be standing in line ten deep while we figure out your individual radios and find where a channel is, AND we have to figure out if things are labeled consistently across agencies. (They aren't.) Beyond that, your communications folks are in a dispatch center, or on call, and we won't be there for an hour or two or six while things are getting messy."

He had no clear answer for that... and this is not about "standing up to the brass". It's about making sure interoperability works if you need it, and that your radios and field personnel are well-acquainted. If your interagency plan is "Everyone goes to Region Ops 2", that's great - IF everyone knows just where that is in their radio.

If you hear through the grapevine that your agency is setting up a large scale exercise, try to be part of it. Make notes. Make points. Learn who to talk to with concerns, and don't be afraid to say "No, chief, that isn't going to work like that." ... but have a plan B ready.

Call me back right away if anything changes.