By Tim Stonesifer
The Evening Sun
YORK COUNTY, Pa. — Joe Klunk stood near the center of the crowd during a Penn Township commissioners meeting with a 911 radio raised in one gloved hand, his eyes pressed shut.
“I’m don’t know if I’m hitting the right button,” the township resident and former commissioner told the township’s fire chief, as he fumbled with his handheld.
“You’re not,” Chief Jan Cromer told him, shaking his head. And imagine if this room were black and filled with smoke, he said.
Cromer’s presentation at Monday night’s meeting highlighted a back-and-forth between York County emergency officials and about 30 Hanover-area residents, who filed in to discuss a county radio system that nearly all in the crowd said isn’t working like it should.
For almost two hours, Cromer, township commissioners and citizens fired off questions to Eric Bistline, executive director of the York County Department of Emergency Services. Those at the meeting complained about a system they say has a history of dropped or missed radio calls and pages, and that most recently failed at the scene of a December fire in West Manheim Township, leaving responders to communicate via cell phones.
Bistline told the crowd that issue occurred when county dispatch tried to patch together the radio frequencies of three counties - York, Adams and Carroll County, Md. It was the third such failure when trying to patch together three counties, he said, and since that time, technicians have worked and are now able to isolate the problem.
A fix should be on the way soon, Bistline said, and in the meantime the county is not attempting such patches, asking firefighters to revert to their older radios or use a manual radio fix at the fire scene.
“I understand (firefighters) don’t care for that, and I certainly understand,” he said, “but we’re working on the problem.”
Asked by Commissioner Craig Prieber, the board’s president, for a timeline on a fix for the patch, Bistline said he could not say.
“I can’t stand here and give you a date today,” he said.
The $36 million radio project — which actually cost the county about $68 million, including the cost of a new building and other related expenses, Bistline said — has drawn the criticism of Hanover-area responders for the last 18 months. Fire officials have complained regularly of connectivity problems in the county’s southwestern corner.
York County added two booster towers — on the West Manheim Township water tank and atop Hanover Hospital - to help reduce dropped calls and dead spots. Cromer and others say that has helped overall connectivity, and Bistline said those towers have nothing to do with the radio patching problem.
Rather, that “very difficult and complex technological problem” arises because of the different frequencies used by each county, Bistline said. When three or more counties respond and a patch is attempted so they can speak on the same channel, it sometimes causes communication to go out altogether on that channel, he said.
“And it appears you folks have a lot of interaction with Adams (County) and Carroll County, Md.,” he said.
Bistline said the county provides standard “work-arounds,” for such a problem, chief among those the ability for emergency responders to change their radios to a different channel at the scene to help restore communication.
But Cromer called such a solution — and the idea of an incident commander monitoring three radios at the scene — “totally impossible.” And Cromer said he was “appalled” at the idea that such a fix is acceptable to the county, because there’s no doubt to him it puts lives in danger.
“My concern is to send my firefighters home and uninjured,” he said, “not in a coffin.”
Pleasant Hill Fire Co. Chief Ted Clousher said at the meeting he shares Cromer’s concern, and said as the incident commander at the West Manheim fire where communication failed, he pulled his men out immediately. Clousher ran the rest of the incident using his personal cell phone, he said.
“We didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “We don’t know what’s going to work and what’s not a lot of the time.”
Jeremy Sparks, Penn Township’s emergency coordinator and a former employee with the county emergency department, asked Bistline and his support staff if the county patched together three disparate, in-county units, such as a fire company, a rescue unit and a hazmat team, could the system fail.
The county officials said it’s possible.
But Bistline said no radio system will ever be perfect, and provided commissioners with a list of statistics that he said shows just how effective the current setup is. The system and county employees handle a tremendous amount of volume, he said, including more than two million individual radio push-to-talk instances in just over a month.
For all that, there have been only three failures like the one in West Manheim, he said.
“You can’t depend 100 percent on this radio,” he said, “or any radio.”
Commissioner Phil Heilman, vice president of the board, thanked Bistline for coming to the meeting, adding it helps a little to ease the feeling many have that the county is ignoring Hanover’s concerns. But he said despite all of the reassuring numbers and technical terms, commissioners will stay on top of this issue, because it’s about more than facts and figures.
“This isn’t about a patch, it’s a life-and-death possibility, and we want to know what’s going on” Heilman said. “We’re not talking about numbers. We’re talking about people.”
For his part, Bistline said he was glad to face the questions, adding he’ll continue to reach out at community and emergency responders’ meetings all over the county.
“I apologize it got to this point,” he said. “I thought we were communicating enough.”
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