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

Expected

[girlintraining]

Detroit has had massive funding and infrastructure problems for some time now. It's a dying city with much of the suburbs either abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and generally being both in appearance and substance as a 3rd world country. It's so bad it has gotten national attention -- an emergency financial planner was sent in to try to right their budget, with limited success.

You can't judge Detroit the same way as you could, say, Chicago. They're no longer really part of the first world. This wouldn't be news if it happened in Afghanistan, for example. It's a sad state of affairs, but this is the inevitable result of a slide into the third world... our bridges and other key infrastructure is also rotting. Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.

Re:Expected

[sjames]

The thing is though, all of TFAs indicate that the city had a valid contract with Motorola to maintain the system including routine testing. In spite of that, no testing happened. While your observations may have bearing in general, in this instance it seems like a well known vendor with a (perhaps undeserved in retrospect) good reputation is the source of the problem.

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:Expected

[Anonymous Coward]

different Motorolas -- it split up, the part Google got is the phone making one, but the radios one is Motorola Solutions

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.