9/11 disconnect: 5 years later, many first responders stuck with second-rate wireless gear

When Denver police responded to a shooting spree at a Safeway warehouse in June, they could talk to each other over standard 800MHz radios. They also could talk to police, fire and emergency responders from neighboring towns, thanks to a $2 million investment made last year to integrate public-safety networks in a 10-county region around Denver.

But when they stormed the 1.3 million-square-foot building, they lost all communications. Chaos reigned inside the warehouse, as 150 employees ran from a disgruntled employee who gunned down five co-workers — killing one — and set fires inside the building.

“The warehouse was a large, dense building with refrigerators. Our radios didn’t work in the building, because nothing would penetrate the refrigerators,” says Dana Hansen, manager of wireless networks for the city and county of Denver. “The SWAT team had to do a workaround. It was less than ideal.”

Click to see: Dana Hansen, manager of wireless networks, Denver

Hansen says Denver police regularly run into situations where its radios won’t work inside big buildings, such as high schools and high-rises. That’s why the department is spending $11 million this year to upgrade its wireless network to provide in-building coverage.

The Denver incident is typical of the state of wireless communication among emergency responders today. Cities and states are trying hard to upgrade their public-safety networks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, but first responders in many jurisdictions don't have such state-of-the-art capabilities as in-building coverage, support for Internet standards, and broadband speeds for text messaging, images and streaming video. These gaps become glaringly evident when a disaster occurs.

Overall, the communications systems used by first responders today are only marginally better than they were five years earlier, says Royce Kincaid, program manager in wireless networks at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, which has developed public-safety systems for Boston, Seattle and Portland, Ore. “They have not solved true interoperability or the broadband-type requirements.”

“There has been modest improvement over the last five years,” agrees John Vaughan, general manager of wireless systems for M/A-Com, a provider of standards-based radios and gateways for public-safety agencies. “The technology is available . . . but it will be 10 years before it will be deployed broadly across the whole country.”