Olympic glory
From a public safety standpoint, any Olympics is a logistical nightmare. But with the horrors of Sept. 11 weighing on their minds, Utah police, fire and EMS could be forgiven for being very, very nervous last February.
Well, nervous they may have been, but they were also prepared.
In fact, public safety radio communications for the Salt Lake City Games were so well organized and implemented that the games themselves were “anticlimactic” for the agencies involved, said Gary Lancaster, assistant director of the Valley Emergency Communications Center. The center is a nine-county regional network that helped manage emergency services for the Winter Games.
“It was quite calm during the Olympics,” Lancaster said. “We didn’t see the call volumes that we expected, and our staff spent a lot of time waiting around for things to happen.”
Compatibility and cooperation
Despite the name “Salt Lake City Games,” the 2002 Winter Olympics took place in 10 venues: five in the city and five in the nearby mountains. About 3,500 athletes from 80 countries competed, engulfed at every turn by spectators and media alike.
From a radio standpoint, Salt Lake City proper wasn’t a problem. “We have a single, highly placed repeater that provides excellent coverage,” said Jerry Evans, communications director of the Salt Lake City Fire Department (SLCFD), which also handles the city’s EMS radio traffic.
In concert with county and city police, the SLCFD handled in-town communications from its own dispatch center. SLC police and fire operate on Motorola Centracom Gold Elite Radio systems on 800MHz. “There’s no interoperability problem here,” Evans said.
However, the mountain venues were something else. To communicate at these games, VECC banded with the Utah Central Area Network — a wide-area network that will eventually deliver state-wide communications — to add 12 extra transmitters and towers to UCAN’s existing 43-tower network. (Sixteen separate E9-1-1 centers tied into UCAN, the largest being VECC. All told, UCAN supported 15,600 radios during the Winter Games.)
For maximum range, most of the transmitters were built on mountaintops, said Steve Proctor, UCAN’s executive director, with one remote unit running on solar power. (Despite the snow and winds that blasted these locations, all stood up well during the Games.)
Like the SLCFD, VECC and UCAN operate on the 800MHz band, using Motorola SmartZone digital equipment. “Five years ago, Utah’s agencies were on a mix of UHF and VHF systems,” Lancaster said. “However, by the time the Games arrived, we were all operating on 800MHz.”
This compatibility was no coincidence, Proctor said. “Five years ago, the Salt Lake City Olympic Organizing Committee realized the wisdom of helping us integrate our mobile radio systems. We negotiated for them to buy the necessary equipment with the understanding that once the Games were over, we’d get to keep it.”
The Olympics also helped Salt Lake City get the grant it needed to upgrade to 800MHz. “Compared to the old VHF system, the 800MHz coverage is quite good,” Evans said. “Of course, it doesn’t perform as well inside buildings or basements, but that’s a general characteristic of this bandwidth.”
The spectre of Sept. 11
Even before Sept. 11, radio communications for the Salt Lake City Games were being planned with extreme care.
“We set up extra radio channels dedicated to the Olympics, with extra dispatchers and call-takers assigned to manage them,” Evans said. “As well, for the Games proper, every single person was scheduled for duty. Nobody was off, except for sickness.”
VECC and UCAN did the same, bringing in extra staff who manned extra stations, using extra phone lines and radios.
GlobalStar lent a number of satellite phones to the event, while the Public Safety Wireless Network provided switches to help incompatible agencies link seamlessly to UCAN. Finally, Pierce Manufacturing lent six radio-equipped fire engines to the SLCFD.
At the venues themselves, security was boosted by bicycle teams — equipped with radios and medical kits — and ‘gators.’ “These are the small golf carts that you see at football games,” Evans said. “Equipped with a stretcher, the gators can cart people out of the venues to curbside, where they can be picked up by ambulances.”
Of course, security kept a close eye on these crews. They also thoroughly searched any police, fire and EMS equipment coming onsite, which is why local agencies began to use ‘sanitized vehicles.’
“These were trucks and cars which had been pre-checked and approved,” Evans said. “Each had a sticker on the window proclaiming this status, and each was generally reserved for Olympic use only. As a result, the crews would just check our undercarriages for bombs, but otherwise let us in without delay.”
Sept. 11 motivated the officials to check “the little things, like making sure all of the payphones were working properly, and that the correct location information was coming back to our dispatch center whenever they called in,” Lancaster said.
This said, Sept. 11’s actual effect was a call to verify the existing plans’ soundness. In fact, no major changes were made after the Sept. 11 review, Evans said, except for the police receiving a lot of extra radios from the Secret Service and the FBI.
Showtime
On Feb. 8, 2002, the XIX Winter Olympics began in earnest in Salt Lake City. So did the work of the region’s public safety networks.
Needless to say, Lancaster’s staff was excited. With the years of preparation and fears of terrorism who could say what was going to happen?
Fortunately, not much.
There was a lot of traffic. “Between Feb. 4 and 20, we processed 8.5 millions calls,” Proctor said. But the extra staff was able to cope with them. Meanwhile, the 800MHz technology held up fine. “There were no major system component failures,” Proctor said.
For their part, the bicycle and gator brigades were so efficient that they ended up doing a lot of first-response work, even though the Olympics had hired staff to do this job.
The kinds of incidents were mainly the kinds you’d expect at 4,390 feet above sea level, Evans said: “dizziness and shortness of breath, and things like that.” However, there wasn’t the level of heart attacks that EMS crews had expected due to altitude, nor any of the other awful possibilities that everyone feared.
In fact, the actual Winter Games were almost a letdown, as far as public safety networks were concerned. That’s a reflection of how smoothly things went, and how well the security system performed.
This is a good thing, when you think of it.
Aftermath
Today, Utah’s police, fire, and EMS are recuperating from two weeks’ worth of global scrutiny.
They’ve already returned their loaner radios, although Jerry Evans does hope to keep some GlobalStar handsets. Meanwhile, the FBI, Secret Service, and FEMA have pulled out, as have the spectators and TV networks. Once again, life has returned to normal in Salt Lake City.
In hindsight, “The cooperative effort between agencies was marvelous,” said Proctor. As for the network performance? Unlike SLCFD, “we found the 800MHz coverage is better than UHF or VHF.”
Clearly, when it came to Olympic public safety networks, Salt Lake City got it right.
The key to its success was to “start planning early, and get everyone involved,” Proctor said. “The more you cooperate with each other, and the earlier you do so, the more time you have to recognize challenges and address them.”
“As well, be flexible,” he added. “And remember: Not everyone needs to be in the same talk group.”
Careless is a freelance telecommunications writer based in Ottawa, ON, Canada. His email address is [email protected]. Photos courtesy of the Utah Communications Agency Network.
