South Carolina county’s P25 radio system provides seamless communications, interoperability during historic flood

For the first responders, it was imperative that interoperability was not an issue in communicating with Coast Guard officials and forming rescue teams, said Martin Kratz, radio communications manager for the county. Charleston was able to provide nearly 200 P25 radios to the state and national coast guards conducting rescues in the traditionally minimal coverage area near Charleston’s coastline.

“They were able to join us on the calls. We were able to create more teams. It gave us more resources,” Kratz said. “Without having the interoperability piece, we would have had to pair more people together for a team.”

The programming of the P25 radios offer first responders the ease of transitioning from a one-person rescue to a full-blown search in the push of a button, Kratz said.

 “Things can grow quickly, so you have more people responding. [Having] a second channel for search, another for staging the unit all on the same radio system, that’s the benefit of the P25 system—just having the tool of more ways of getting more people to be able to communicate together.”

Because the flooding and rescues were taking place in communities across the state, the Palmetto 800 system that serves 50,000 local and state users provided another layer of interoperability for the rescue efforts, Marshall said. Charleston County’s success with its P25 system helped encourage the state to upgrade its radio system to P25 in 2017, he said.

“We value that partnership with the county,” Marshall said. “I am very proud of how our local team handled this and how the system performed in the way it was designed to perform during the most difficult conditions, ensuring, at the end of the day, that public-safety personnel have reliable communications when they need it most.”