Pulaski County 911 Board members learned at their May 8 meeting that their proposal to put a repeater antenna on a water tower east of St. Robert will help improve the ability of firefighters, law enforcement and ambulance personnel to communicate, but coverage will still be “fair to spotty” on the eastern end of the county.
That may be the best that can be hoped for, however.
911 Director Michelle Graves read a letter indicating that “this new repeater tower should be a big improvement over what you have, but it will be total coverage.”
Adding an antenna to the water tower will cost about $50,000, Graves said, and the antenna is a high-quality product designed to work properly. The main problem, Graves said, is the hilly terrain of Pulaski County which has deep valleys where radio signals cannot penetrate.
“It will cover parts of Big Piney but it won’t cover very many,” Graves said. “Guys, no matter where we put it, we would have to put a tower every 20 miles to get full coverage because the terrain is so crappy.”
“So why are we even looking at doing this?” asked board member Becky Wood.
“It’s better than what we have, and Devil’s Elbow is where we’ve been having the big problems,” said board member Bob Carter, who also serves as Waynesville’s police chief.
The Devil’s Elbow area east of St. Robert is in a deep river valley where numerous residents have built homes. It’s part of the Waynesville Rural Fire Protection District and firefighters have had serious trouble contacting their base stations when fighting fires in that area.
Other parts of the county have different problems. Graves said Dixon, which has its own dispatchers and tower, uses different radio frequencies.
“They’re saying they are not getting our fire pages, so they want us to page them out twice and then call the fire chief,” Graves said. “From a 911 perspective, that’s going to be a problem for us because on a major fire we’re going to be having lots of phone calls, and also, what happens if the chief doesn’t answer?”
Graves said there’s a transmission problem in the northern part of Pulaski County as well, and said a test from Hancock to Dixon showed there is no coverage at all on Highway 133.
“We’re going to go to the phone call, but I think we ought to ask them to go to the 911 frequency, but he doesn’t want to do that because not all their radios have the 911 frequency and they want to have them talk to each other on their own private frequency without everybody else hearing,” Graves said.
Wood agreed that could be a problem.
“This will work OK until somebody doesn’t get a phone call and somebody’s house burns down,” Wood said.
Graves asked board members for their opinions, but said paging out other departments to assist Dixon should prevent disasters.
“Luckily on a structure fire we have auto-aid anyway,” Graves said. “What’s happening is people are hearing us and responding but we don’t know about it because they can’t talk to us.”
Board member Doug Yurecko, who also serves as the Waynesville Rural Fire Chief, said something must be done to address the communication problems for the entire county before a disaster strikes.
“My concern about communications issues is we need to sit down with someone and come up with a long-term and a mid-term plan on these issues,” Yurecko said.
In other business:
• Board members received bids of $900 from the Waynesville Police Department and $500 from 911 employee Art Windham for a jeep that’s currently used by the 911 board. Carter said he’d like to obtain the jeep as an animal control vehicle because the converted ambulance now in use has prohibitively expensive diesel fuel bills.
• Board members agreed to participate in the annual Relay for Life for cancer research.
• Graves announced that two new employees have been hired; one of the two will train as a dispatcher and then be cross-trained as the 911 receptionist.