Detroit's Emergency Dispatch System Fails

dstates writes "For most of Friday, police and firefighters in Detroit were forced to operate without their usual dispatch radio when the emergency dispatch system failed. The radio system used for communication between 911 dispatchers and Detroit's police, fire and EMS crews went down around 5:30 a.m. Friday morning, causing a backlog of hundreds of calls and putting public safety at risk. Michigan State Police allowed Detroit's emergency system to use the state's communication towers, but access was restricted to top priority calls out of fear of overloading the State system. More than 60 priority-1 calls and more than 170 non-emergency calls were backed up. With no dispatch to communicate if something went wrong and backup was needed, police were forced to send officers out in pairs for safety concerns on priority-1 calls. Detroit's new police chief, James Craig, says he's 'appalled' that a redundant system did not kick in. The outage occurred only days after Craig took office. The $131 million Motorola system was installed in 2005 amid controversy over its funding. Spokesmen for Motorola said parts of the system were regularly maintained but acknowledged that backup systems had not been tested in the past two years. They said the problem was a hardware glitch in the link between dispatch and the individual radios. As of 9 p.m. Friday, a Motorola spokesman said the system was stable and the company would continue troubleshooting next week."

Comments

Should have turned to the HAMs!

[blocsync]

I live in Florida, and when weather gets bad it can destroy critical communications equipment (including redundant systems). One thing I've seen done in the past is pushing communications through Amateur radio operators. Who (unlike the name would have you believe) are EXTREMELY professional and they tend to be able to very rapidly deploy communications equipment from the inner cities all the way out to the rural areas. Some of their equipment is capable of city and state coverage, but some of them can also establish international communication on a moments notice. This would have been a good fail-over for the lower priority calls. Just my 2 cents... http://www.arrl.org/ares has some info on the group I'm referencing.

Re:Should have turned to the HAMs!

[Technician]

A Motorolla trunked radio system consists of a pool of repeaters. A single repeater is placed into the control for the repeater site. On failure of the computer, all the repeaters switch over to a failover mode and become simple repeaters. All talkgroups vanish and all communications are shared by the repeater the radios have been assigned to. If properly assigned the dispatch and patrol should be all on one repeater. A second radio in the dispatch should be on another repeater along with top level "staff" communications.

Upon failure of an entire radio site due to power failure, antenna catastrophic failure, etc, then the backup site should kick in.

A poorly managed radio system will have radios assigned to repeaters at random. I have seen this, so when failover happens, teams can't talk to each other as they are not on the same repeater and other services are blended in so some patrols and some fire may be on the same repeater and some may be on another with no communication between repeaters.

This poor management happens when the person laying out the system is suddenly downsized and someone without knowledge of the plan has to add or replace radios and have no idea want the default radio assignments should be so they are assigned at random.

Re:Should have turned to the HAMs!

[Mr. Freeman]

Nonsense. HAM radio operators are less relevant today than they have ever been. HAMs provided useful emergency communications two decades ago, but no longer. Nowadays, cellular providers truck out COWs (Cellular On Wheels. i.e. mobile cell sites) within hours of a disaster, or even preemptively if a disaster is expected. After a disaster, you'll see people talking on Nextels, not relaying messages through HAM operators. Sure, the red cross will accept volunteer radio operators, but only because policy dictates that they do so. They'll be told to set up useless radio stations and relay worthless information until they get bored and leave, or they're told that they're no longer needed.

If you want the truth about HAM radio involvement in emergency communications then you need to talk to HAMs that have actually attempted to participate in such activities within the last decade. Organizations like ARRL are going to talk up how important HAM radio is because that's the point of the organization. They'll tell you that some number of HAM radio operators participated during some disaster, but they won't tell you that the only traffic sent over those nets consisted of nothing more than periodic radio checks. They won't tell you that all HAM radio stations were set up in tactically unimportant locations. Half the time they're in areas which don't need a radio operator and the other half of the time they're set up next to a fully-functional radio truck which doesn't need any kind of HAM support.

In the situation submitted by the OP, HAM radio wouldn't have helped anyway. HAMs can only practically set up fixed locations, which are already served by landlines or personal cell service. A mobile solution would involve putting a HAM radio operator into every single squad car, which would be impractical for obvious reasons.

Re:Expected

[mjpollard]

If you're talking "suburbs" within the Detroit city limits, then yes, I agree with you. (I went by my grandma's old house in northern Detroit a while ago -- the 7 Mile/Gratiot/Hayes area, for the natives among us -- and "reclaimed by nature" doesn't begin to describe it. I nearly wept at the sight as the memories of my brother and I playing in the back yard when we were kids surfaced.) Most in the Metro Detroit area, however, know "suburbs" as the cities and towns outside the city limits, cities such as Grosse Pointe, Royal Oak, Southfield, Dearborn, etc., all of which are alive and thriving.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

That turned out pretty well... It only took a few hundred years.

We should try it again. And put it on tv too.

Re:Expected

[RubberDogBone]

Wait wait wait. Perhaps you hear the Motorola name and think this is a vendor with a proud and respected name and a great reputation. And that's true. 30 years ago.

The Motorola Solutions of here and now is notorious among Public Safety agencies for installing crap equipments, failures like this where the failover doesn't work, system problems, interface problems, junk radios, and all the while overcharging for all of it. Even when they low-bid something, they can be counted on to deliver a solution that doesn't actually, you know, work, and then negotiate extra fees to fix it. And fix it again, and again, Because by then, the agency has already spend X+Y dollars on it so they can't throw it away and get Kenwood or Harris in there. Besides, bad things happen when Moto loses contracts. Like it drops dead suddenly and mysteriously and doesn't come back for a long time. Sabotage? No. They just quit with the zero-day hot fixes.

Chiefs of Police and Fire and other agencies know this stuff goes on but good old /\/\ has lots of lobbyists and sales weasels throwing dinner and junkets at anything that breathes and can vote for or endorse a Motorola contract. If the local Chief doesn't want to play, then they go for the city managers, the city council people, the Mayor, the dog catcher, anyone they have to. They totally act like a big defense contractor except on a local level where the local yokels have no response this sort of action except to vote for Team /\/\ every time.

So in other words, the crap that happened to Detroit is FAR from the only similar situation where the system dies. NY has had problems, San Francisco, DeKalb County GA, Denver, systems all over the place. It happens so often that it's considered normal Moto behaviour and THAT'S scary.

Where are the other vendors? They're out there bidding too. But Motorola is sort of the penis enhancement of radios where "all the BIG GUYS have Motorola so you KNOW you want to have it too, don't you?" is what the sales reps say. You know that big city you want to be like? Yeah? They have Motorola. So sign right here. No no, that's not a contract change. We just corrected a mistake for you. Just sign it.