By Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Charlotte Observer
Charlotte, N.C. — Emergency radio communications in Charlotte went down for nearly an hour Monday morning, a glitch authorities say was caused by a broken backup generator, human error and the switch from Daylight Savings Time.

The radio system is the primary means of communication for police officers, firefighters and paramedics in Charlotte. It was the second time in as many weeks that the emergency system has gone down.

Despite the outages, all first responders were able to answer calls for service.

But the 9:15 a.m. radio blackout exposed a weakness in the city’s emergency communications network, which was bolstered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

During the outage, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police received 70 emergency 9-1-1 calls, which is about normal for that time. Police Capt. Chuck Adkins said the response to calls was “only slightly longer” than normal, but he couldn’t provide numbers or say whether the department met its benchmarks for responding to emergency calls.

The backup generator authorities believe was at fault has been replaced and tested, and the city has ordered a new one, city officials say.

Police said they are trying to improve how they handled the outage.

“We’re also working on a contingency plan just in case any time in the future we have another incident like this,” said Adkins, who heads the department’s communications division.

The city has spent more than $9 million since Sept. 11, 2001, to improve its radio network so it won’t face the same communication problems that contributed to the deaths of firefighters in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The city’s business services department runs the network, which automatically tests the backup generator every Monday at 10 a.m., said assistant director Marie Harris.

The weekly test has been conducted for years, Harris said. “The whole point is to test the power supply and the backup generator.”

Last week, the backup generator malfunctioned. Emergency radios were out for five or six minutes, Harris said.

Because of that glitch, Harris said, the city wanted to have technicians on hand Monday in case something went wrong with this week’s test.

The technicians were headed to the communications center near Sugar Creek Road around 10 a.m. Monday for the test.

But no one had reset the system’s clock after Daylight Savings Time, which ended early Sunday. So the test happened an hour earlier than expected.

Again, the backup generator didn’t kick in, Harris said, and it didn’t switch the system back to main power either.

The system’s last-resort backup batteries were dead in 15 minutes.

Across Charlotte, the walkie-talkies of first responders went silent. Alerts flashed on computer screens in communications centers, notifying dispatchers that the radios were out.

At the time, the police department had the most users on the system. Officers use radios to notify each other about everything from routine traffic stops to an officer whose life is in danger.

“Our concerns were first public safety, but also the safety of any of our employees that were out there that were cut off from any communication,” Adkins said. “The worst-case scenario for our agency was that our officers that were out there on the street were not able to communicate directly back with us.”

Adkins didn’t have an exact number of CMPD officers on patrol at 9:15 Monday morning, but at any one time, there are about 150 officers on the street.

Dispatchers sent messages to officers via Internet-connected laptops in their cars, telling police to return to field offices across the city and ride to calls in pairs. Officers also used city-issued cell phones to communicate.

Paramedics were also affected by the outage, but Jeff Keith, deputy director of Medic, the county’s paramedic service, said the agency had a “seamless” transition to a backup statewide radio system.

There were about 30 ambulances in service throughout the county. Fifteen calls were in progress during the outage, and paramedics responded to another 23.

Keith said paramedics also have laptops in their vehicles. Dispatchers were prepared to use pagers and cell phones to get in touch with paramedics, but never had to.

“These are not things that when they happen, you say, ‘Well what do we do?'” Keith said.

“These are things that there’s a playbook for. And you say, ‘Let’s go to the playbook.'” 

Posted with permission of The Charlotte Observer.