Device links safety forces

By Ed Runyan

Keeping in touch matters a lot when lives hang in the balance.

CANFIELD — As Cardinal Joint Fire District firefighter Matt Rarick demonstrated a new piece of communications equipment to Chuck Colucci, Canfield’s assistant police chief, it became apparent the police officer saw some exciting possibilities.

“That’s really cool, and it sets up quick,” he said.

With that, the educational process had begun for the Incident Commanders Radio Interface — a suitcase-sized device the department has acquired though a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The department serves Canfield and Canfield Township.

The equipment is designed to help police, fire and other emergency personnel — who often have portable radios operating on different radio frequencies — communicate with each other during natural or man-made disasters or incidents.

The grant brings about $16,000 worth of equipment and training with the understanding that the district will make the equipment available to other agencies throughout the county, said Don Hutchison, assistant fire chief.

The fire district is one of 56 agencies across the U.S. selected to receive the equipment.

Hutchison and Rarick, training coordinator for the district, gave a demonstration of the equipment last week. It has five input locations where portable radios can be plugged in.

Each of the five radios can serve as a link between the ICRI and the firefighters who use that type of radio.

From there, portable radios from all of the departments “plugged in” can communicate with one another on the same radio channel. If desired, sub-groups of radios can communicate with each other on their own channel.

Without such a “bridge,” fire or police departments have to use a more primitive method of communicating among the various departments, Rarick said.

For instance, when a number of departments are working together on a large fire, someone at the head of each department frequently has to coordinate all of the firefighters from his department and then communicate in person with heads of other departments.

Colucci said drunken-driver roadblocks are a good example of times when communication difficulties occur. Such checkpoints can involve more than a half-dozen police agencies at once, none of them able to communicate directly with the others except by cell phone.

“When we get in a situation with other police departments, fire departments or whatever, our biggest failing is always communication,” Colucci said.

Sometimes the officers can hear scanner traffic coming from the other officers but can’t respond back to what is heard.

“To be able to go to the radios is awesome,” Colucci said.

Hutchison said the county has access to older technology for bridging the gap between the portable radios from various departments, but the equipment is more difficult to operate and takes longer to set up.

The ICRI can be deployed within about three minutes, Hutchison said.

It is also not necessary to have someone with specialized training to operate it.

It can run for 30 hours on eight “AA” batteries. The bridge could be useful in a variety of situations where communication is normally difficult because of “dead spots” frequently experienced by portable radio users, such as tunnels, malls, hospitals or schools.

It can also be used as a replacement for the standard radio transmission system used by a police or fire department if the standard radio system gets knocked out by a natural or man-made disaster, Hutchison noted.

runyan@vindy.com