Stile: Backup is Crucial
Public safety communications coordination in New York is complicated enough on an average day. In the wake of the WTC attack, the process has become even thornier. Nevertheless, for Vincent Stile, those thorns surround a rose, and that rose is called cooperation.
Stile, of the Suffolk County Police Communications Bureau on Long Island, NY, is the local frequency advisor for Southern New York for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials—International. He is also APCO’s first vice president, and according to APCO’s leadership succession, he will become its president in 2003.
“We have enough backup,” Stile said of the state of the post-attack infrastructure. “Our biggest need is frequencies.”
New York public safety communications officials have been discussing action plans in case of a terrorist attack for more than 10 years, Stile said, and “Things have been working. These guys have been putting in 12-hour days.”
National 800MHz channels have been the primary routes for interoperability in the wake of the attack, Stile said, but it has been an effort to coordinate firefighters on VHF, police on UHF-T band and city services on 800MHz. In the future, interoperability channels in UHF may be the regional focus, based on a UHF-TV channel 16 waiver.
An attempt had been ongoing within Region 8 (New Jersey, southern New York and western Connecticut) to coordinate efforts and to create an overlay plan prior to the WTC attack. In particular, an 11-agency group in the NYC area, including police, fire, EMS and DOT, has been working on interoperability and mutual aid since 1990.
“We’ve been working on a communications network from Montauk Point (the eastern tip of Long Island) to Bergen County (NJ),” Stile said, but progress is slow because of the different technologies used by all the agencies in between. There is always bureaucracy as well. “We were just building out. Government works very slow, and money is always critical,” Stile said.
The response to the disaster held numerous bright spots, Stile said. The New York State Police was able to get a Special Temporary Authority from the FCC to relocate from the WTC to the Chrysler Building. With five stations in the area, that left NYSP with four sites for redundancy. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was able to switch its operations to its Staten Island site. The New York State Office of Emergency Management sent Stile two emergency base stations that were quickly tuned and deployed to sites in Nassau County and on Rikers Island.
Stile said he and his peers in Region 8 are preparing an overall report on how the public safety communications community responded to the events of Sept. 11 and what it requires to improve interoperability. To other agencies around the country that might be placed in an emergency communications situation before this crisis has passed, Stile had advice: “Have backup systems and redundancy. Establish alternate paths, whether you’re putting a system on a tower or a building. Have an overlay plan.”