Signals from ground zero
U.S. public safety networks are hard to disrupt. Weeks after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center, public safety communicators continue to assess how badly their networks have been damaged. The bottom line is, communications systems were battered but not beaten.
The fall of a legendary site
As tower sites go, 1 World Trade Center was one of the best in the world—certainly the best in New York City for wide-area coverage. Small wonder: with a rooftop 1,368 feet above street level, 1 WTC was the highest building on the East Coast. The nearly one acre of rooftop bristled with antennas spaced at about every five feet.
“It offered the most efficient coverage for public safety, or indeed any kind of RF transmission,” said John Paleski, president of Old Bridge, NJ–based Subcarrier Communications. Subcarrier, a communications site management company, lost numerous antennas when 1 WTC collapsed.
Pinnacle Towers’ Joe Furmanek, director of investor relations, echoed Paleski’s assessment. Based in Sarasota County, FL, Pinnacle had the management contract for 42 non-broadcast antennas on 1 WTC’s rooftop.
“We covered public safety networks, paging firms, cab companies—the works,” Furmanek said. Federal government agencies were affected as well. Furmanek wasn’t at liberty to identify them beyond saying, “Just think of all the highest-level ones in the country. They were all there.”
Height alone didn’t make 1 WTC’s rooftop ideal for transmission; it was also the layout.
“With the exception of the broadcast tower, you had a very flat, uncluttered roof to work with,” explained Pinnacle President Ben Gaboury. This made it possible to mount the antennas “in almost a geometric pattern,” he added, with the cables traveling neatly through hatchways “into the multiple equipment rooms one floor below.”
For Richard Tell, losing the WTC sites was like losing a personal friend. Tell, the president of Las Vegas–based Richard Tell Associates, had been the key RF safety consultant to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Motorola and the WTC broadcasters since 1996. Tell assisted the Port Authority in developing a comprehensive RF safety program for the buildings. The rooftops had been measured and modeled on numerous occasions to ensure that technicians and maintenance workers on the roof of 1 WTC—and visitors viewing the city from the roof of 2 WTC—would be safe.
“It was a truly amazing transmission site,” recalled Tell. Having performed RF field measurements for the broadcast mast earlier this year, he added that “to see the WTC come down along with its 351-foot antenna mast made me feel sick.”
All of the city’s TV stations used the antenna mast on 1 WTC. So did four commercial FM radio stations. All went off the air when the building fell. Only one, WCBS (Channel 2) had a backup facility in place at the Empire State Building.
As for non-broadcast applications, the rooftops of 1 WTC and its twin, 2 WTC, were home to a veritable forest of antennas—98 in all. These served a wide range of networks, including the Port Authority’s 800MHz Ericsson EDACS trunking system, which was lost in the fire and building collapse. One of the federal government’s 400MHz Motorola Smartnet trunking systems was destroyed as well, said Larry Van Horn, an editor with Monitoring Times, a magazine for scanner enthusiasts.
“Even the New Jersey Highway Patrol took a hit,” Van Horn said, because two-thirds of New Jersey was covered by an 800MHz trunking system on the World Trade Center. Meanwhile, the New York State Police’s network was disrupted, but not destroyed, when 2 WTC disintegrated. That site was home to the state police 800MHz Ericsson Metro-21 EDACS trunking transmitters and antennas. Fortunately, the NYSP has sites and towers in other parts of the city.
In the midst of all this mayhem, FDNY’s communications infrastructure emerged relatively unscathed. “The fire department’s central offices each have their own transmitter antennas,” said a source within the department. Because none of these sites was located at the World Trade Center, “they were completely unaffected,” the source said.
Of course, this only applies to the FDNY’s dispatch function. Beyond the immeasurable human cost, hundreds of mobile and portable radios were lost when the Twin Towers collapsed on emergency responders from FDNY/EMS, NYPD, the Port Authority and other emergency agencies. FDNY’s Field Communications Unit, which was at the World Trade Center, was also seriously damaged when 1 WTC collapsed.
Meanwhile, the city of New York’s 15-channel Motorola Smartnet System network remained fully operational during the crisis. According to Steve Gorecki, public relations manager for Motorola’s North America Group, it served as “a primary system used for interoperability.” The city’s Department of Information and Telecommunication Technology (DoITT) was in charge of running it.
Coping with the unthinkable
When the World Trade Center was lost, the New York State Police reacted quickly. The agency’s response was pragmatic and practical: “We just took an antenna at another one of our sites and pointed it down into Manhattan,” said State Police Dispatcher Sgt. Bob Jones. Of course, this was a makeshift measure, as was the State Police’s deployment of VHF hand-helds. What was needed was a replacement for the WTC site, and the State Police soon found one at the midtown Chrysler Building. Surprisingly, this installation went extremely fast, Jones said. In fact, “We had it up and running by the evening of the 12th.” Fortuitously, previous tenants at the Chrysler Building site had left four antennas in place when they moved out. Better still, these tenants had also left antenna combiners behind, “so we were able to utilize the existing antennas,” Jones said.
This left the need for a transmitter. The day was saved by M/A-COM, which rushed a five-channel Ericsson independent 800MHz trunking system to the site. M/A-COM also threw in 200 hand-helds for good measure.
Today, the coverage being provided by the State Police’s Chrysler building site is “very good,” said Jones. “We now pretty much have the whole city back.”
With the NYSP back on air, the next step will be to build a more permanent replacement site. “We’re looking at probably trying to stay in the Chrysler building,” Jones said, “but obviously we have to do a lot of propagation studies.”
Motorola also distinguished itself by sending 86 truckloads of gear to New York. These supplies included a new 15-channel Motorola 800MHz backup system for the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, which runs on the DoITT’s Smartnet System. Motorola employees worked around the clock to build the backup system, doing in 30 hours what usually takes three weeks. P & R Communications, Dayton, OH, supplied a trailer-mounted, 107-foot tower, antennas and grounding equipment. Beyond this, Motorola delivered separate trailer-mounted 800MHz and 900MHz radio systems to New York.
“We’ve also sent in 10,000 portable radios and 16,000 batteries,” said Motorola’s Gorecki.
Rebuilding with resolve, realism
Clearly, these emergency solutions (which also include the deployment of HF radios) are no substitute for the loss of the WTC platform. It’s still unknown what will end up replacing the World Trade towers, with all their wonderful height. Chances are that if any structures are erected at the site in South Manhattan in the distant future, they will be no more than 50 to 60 stories tall, in line with current architectural trends and the realities of urban firefighting.
Even if a new World Trade Center should rise, phoenix-like, back up to 110 stories, would telecom companies put all their eggs in one basket again? It’s not likely, said Subcarrier’s Paleski.
“We learned two lessons on Sept. 11,” Paleski said. “The first is not to concentrate all of one’s critical telecommunications facilities in one place. The second is to have a backup ready to go immediately, in case something unthinkable happens.
“No one learned this second point more cruelly than New York’s TV broadcasters,” Paleski added. “Why, WABC, WNBC, WWOR, WPIX and WNET had just finished installing their digital TV transmitters on 1 WTC, days before it was destroyed.”
It will be months before we know the full extent of how badly New York’s public safety networks were damaged. In fact, given the heightened emphasis on U.S. homeland security, we may never know. Were the city and state networks caught unprepared? Yes and no. Yes, in that no one expected the World Trade Center towers would be completely destroyed. No, in that backup plans were in place, and the people who manned them did their jobs, despite the catastrophe.
