The dead zone

Stowe, VT, and surrounding Lamoille County include what is undeniably one of the world’s favorite ski areas. But police, fire and emergency medical services have to cope with large radio coverage “dead zones” that can delay service to the public and deny backup for police officers and other public safety workers.

Lamoille County’s public safety radio communications networks are plagued by terrible coverage. It’s so bad that their 5W Motorola analog portables (UHF for police; VHF for fire and EMS) “only cover about 32% of our territory,” said Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux. “Meanwhile, our 100W mobiles do better at 54%, but that’s still not good enough.”

George Spoerl, the county’s senior dispatcher, said that as a result, “we have a very tough time. A lot of areas are very dead.”

Poor radio coverage puts the public at risk. “For instance, if you’re in a car accident, our portables often can’t reach back to dispatch to alert the hospital,” said Marcoux. “This means our people have to run back to their mobiles to get through. As you can imagine, this can be difficult at times.”

However, the danger also extends to local public safety workers — especially police, who patrol singly. “There could be a raging gun battle taking place, and yet you couldn’t get hold of anyone,” said Stowe Police Chief Ken Kaplan. “To put it mildly, this puts our officers’ lives in danger.”

A case in point: A few months ago, an off-duty police officer spotted and gave chase to two suspects in a stolen car. Both were wanted for numerous burglaries and car thefts, and both had eluded capture before.

Not surprisingly, the officer called for backup units to help corral the suspects. However, due to the Lamoille County radio system’s dead spots, it was virtually impossible to coordinate the operation.

“It was frustrating, to say the least,” said Marcoux. “The dispatcher was unable to ensure the officer’s safety, because he kept losing him. As well, the responding units couldn’t talk to each other, let alone the officer who was actually behind the suspects.

“The result was that a chase ensued that ran 25 or 30 miles, and the suspects eventually got away. Had we had better communications, they would have been apprehended.”

Tower shortage

The mountains and valleys that make Vermont so picturesque — and Lamoille such a great skiing location — make radio communications a nightmare. Lamoille County sets an example of especially difficult coverage, where a few towers must serve 461 square miles of rough terrain.

An 80-foot tower serves the town of Stowe’s UHF communications for police and VHF communications for fire and EMS. A UHF link connects the Stowe tower with the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department’s 120-foot tower at Hyde Park. That county tower provides communications for police, fire and EMS. The Sheriff’s Department also has a 100-foot tower at Carpenter Hill that includes a UHF repeater for the Stowe Police Department and a rooftop antenna at the Cambridge Fire Department near the Smuggler’s Notch ski resort.

This complement of sites is insufficient to provide 95% coverage, the generally accepted standard for public safety network performance. To reach this goal, the region should have “several tower sites to supply the required public safety coverage levels typically required by government agencies,” reads the $35,000 “Lamoille County, VT, Public Safety Communications Study” prepared last year by RCC Consultants.

All told, Lamoille County encompasses 10 towns and 23,233 people, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. However, during winter weekends and holidays, the population swells considerably as people flock to Stowe and Smuggler’s Notch — named for the caves that held smuggled goods during the War of 1812 and booze during Prohibition.

“For instance, in Stowe our normal population is 4,200, but on weekends it swells to anywhere from 20,000 to 25,000,” Kaplan said.

Not surprisingly, most of these tourists are on the slopes, where ski patrols are always active. Unfortunately, when things go wrong, it’s not always easy to get the word out.

“We have a fair number of back-country and high-angle rescues,” said Neil Van Dyke, Stowe’s director of emergency services.

“However, in much of the region, we’re not able to speak directly to the dispatcher from the field. We tend to set up a mobile relay truck to help out, but even with that, coverage can be spotty at times.”

Marcoux added: “We have a real problem in the ski area. We desperately need to have a tower there.”

To make matters worse, many tourists enjoy Lamoille County so much that they buy land in suitably picturesque and isolated locations. In many cases, the homes they’re building are in dead zones. In fact, the county’s population rose 17.7% percent from 1990 to 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In contrast, Vermont’s population growth for the same period was 8.2%.

So why not build new towers and fix the coverage problem? Despite its tourist areas, Lamoille County isn’t exactly rich. According to the Census Bureau, the county’s median household income is $33,418.

Beyond money, there’s also the question of NIMBY, or “not in my back yard.” Vermont is noted for its landscape, which is why many of its residents don’t take kindly to new towers. This explains why an effort to raise a 160-foot tower on Carpenter Hill has spent five years in legal wrangles. The radio equipment for this tower, which has already been purchased, has languished in storage for several years.

Ironically, the RCC study has given the Garfield Hyde Park Neighborhood Alliance, which opposes the tower, the ammunition they need to defeat it. Because the study says the proposed tower would only improve coverage by 1%, “it’s not like this thing is going to save lives,” Garfield resident Eric Beckstrom was quoted as saying in the Stowe Reporter.

Attempts at solutions

Despite this unintentional unhelpful observation, the RCC survey offers two options. The first is to do nothing, which the RCC study says “is not the recommended approach.” The second, which RCC and the county’s public safety agencies do endorse, is to take a three-phase approach to the problem.

In Phase I, which would cost anywhere from $946,000 to $1.2 million, the county would build a new 100-foot tower and transmission facility at the existing Carpenter Hill site. In addition, a new transmission site would be constructed on Madonna Peak at the Smuggler’s Notch Resort. Mounted on the peak’s chair lift machine at 3,647 feet, the antenna would vastly improve coverage in this part of the county. What’s more, the whole permit hassle could be avoided because this phase relies on existing structures. Throw in some microwave links and countywide channel reorganizations, plus other related equipment, and radio coverage would improve in Lamoille County.

But it wouldn’t improve enough. That’s why Phase II calls for three more transmission sites, including three 180-foot towers at a cost between $1.7 million and $2.4 million. Phase III would expand microwave links and improve portable radio performance for an additional $1 million to $1.3 million.

So what’s happening? Not much. The problem is money, said Marcoux. “Right now, if we could get $900,000, we could do Phase I and attach a microwave dish and antenna at Madonna Mountain.”

Given the current state of the economy, it’s unlikely that either the county or state governments will allocate the necessary funds for Phase I, let alone Phases II and III. That’s why Marcoux and his colleagues are hoping to get some funds from the federal government’s Homeland Security budget.

“We don’t know what the criteria or the process will be,” said Neil Van Dyke. “But we’ve had a pretty strong indication that something’s coming.”

The county’s public safety agencies hope so. After all, how can an agency do its job when two-thirds of its territory is in a radio dead zone?

Careless is a freelance telecommunications writer based in Ottawa, ON, Canada. His email address is [email protected].