By Jim Phillips, The Athens News
Original publication date: Dec. 13

Athens County, Ohio — In the flurry to beef up national security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, the federal government handed out a king’s ransom in money and equipment.

One of the Homeland Security tools that came to Athens County from the feds free of charge was a giant mobile communications unit, now under control of the Athens County Sheriff’s Office.

While the truck — whose price tag a previous sheriff estimated at more than $440,000 — is meant to serve 10 area counties in addition to Athens, it doesn’t get out of the garage much, according to local officials. When it does, though, they insist, it’s a great boon.

“It’s something sometimes you wish you didn’t have,” admitted Sheriff Pat Kelly of the big, tech-laden vehicle. “But it’s an invaluable tool as far as communications.”

The county has hosted the vehicle for more than five years, but its odometer, checked Tuesday, read under 5,400 miles. It probably logs more time in officer training sessions and parades than in responding to emergencies.

Despite repeated efforts to obtain the information, The Athens NEWS was unable to get an exact record of occasions when the vehicle has been taken out of storage over the past two years, and for what purposes. Sheriff Kelly directed the inquiry to Doug Bentley, director of the county’s emergency communications service, who after multiple attempts said he could find no way to extract this information from the data held by the agency.

“Is there a lot of time when it sits idle? Yes,” acknowledged sheriff’s investigator Steve Sedwick, who operates the vehicle when it is used. “But when it sits idle, it’s not costing anything.”

That’s not strictly true, though the cost of storing and maintaining the vehicle are apparently pretty small.

Kelly noted that it’s kept in an undisclosed rural location, in a garage for which the county pays no rent. The county pays for heating the site, he said, because the truck’s equipment must be kept above 50 degrees.

The sheriff said he also pays for basic upkeep such as new batteries, as well as for a phone/Internet hookup- – the latter bill he estimated at about $160 a month.

He also recalled that when he took office in 2008, “a lot of things were broken on it,” and he spent an estimated $2,200 to get it back in shape, on items such as new batteries and a new antenna.

Sedwick estimated a complete fill-up of the truck’s tank with diesel fuel — which runs both the engine and an onboard generator — costs about $150. He said he doesn’t let the tank go below half-full, and tops it up to full maybe four or five times in a year.

Kelly acknowledged that when he does use the truck, this sometimes adds to his overtime costs, as only a few officers are trained to operate it. (Sedwick said that at this point, he’s the one who typically has to run the vehicle, as he has kept up with ongoing training.)

With 11 counties officially on the list for the truck, it gets more use than it would just by Athens County — though in many cases, it’s taken out for “display” purposes — a parade or some type of public educational event.

Gallia County Sheriff Joseph R. Browning said his agency has occasionally taken advantage of the vehicle; the most notable instance, he said, was probably a 2007 incident in which a state probation officer drowned in the Ohio River while chasing a suspect who had fled from a traffic stop by the Gallipolis Police.

Browning said his agency has also used the vehicle for disaster-response training, and “it really helped to make the drill more realistic… It’s very handy.”

In Athens County, the truck’s shining moment of actual emergency use was undoubtedly during the Sept. 16 storm event, in which tornados and related storms hit Athens County, causing major damage in spots including The Plains, York Township and East State Street in Athens.

“That vehicle was invaluable to us during the tornado,” Kelly said, noting that it was set up at the Athens High School in The Plains, and served as a central communications center for all agencies involved in dealing with the storms’ aftermath.

And this is precisely what the vehicle is designed for, and all it’s designed for — despite what seems a lingering misperception on the part of some members of the public, who think it’s some type of anti-terrorist battle wagon.

The real reason for the truck’s existence, however, is to provide radio “inter-operability” for those rare occasions when numerous agencies, all using different radio frequencies, suddenly have to work together. And this, say officials, it does supremely well.

Another occasion when it comes in handy is Athens’ annual uptown Halloween party. The city of Athens always calls in the help of many off-duty officers from other jurisdictions to handle the giant street bash, and such a situation is tailor-made for the big radio truck, which is set up outside the sheriff’s office uptown.

“With various different agencies coming in to work Halloween, they bring their own departments’ radios,” explained Athens Police Chief Richard Mayer. Without the command center, he said, coordinating communications among all those officers could be a nightmare.

Inside, the truck is crammed with banks of equipment, scanners, video screens, and hand-held microphones. Sedwick demonstrated how he can collect radio frequencies from as many as 25 different agencies, and set up as many as seven different “networks” for them to participate in, all by a few click-and-drag actions on a laptop computer. (The system has greater capacity than this, he said, but he’s never had to go above 25 agencies and seven networks.)

This means that even with a large variety of officers in the field, all using their own radios, he can hook selected agencies up to each other in any combinations, so that to members of any given network, it’s as if they’re all talking on the same frequency.

Sedwick showed off some of the other features of the truck, including a rooftop camera with 360-degree rotation and zoom capability; its own weather vane, which can take weather conditions on site; and a TV screen and speakers mounted on the outside of the vehicle, which can display satellite feeds or other info.

The officer also noted that if the county’s 911 emergency communications system were ever to crash or be disabled — admittedly unlikely — the truck could stand in for the system temporarily.

“Will that happen? Probably not. But it’s a backup plan,” he said.

Kelly acknowledged that at some future date, if all police, fire and emergency agencies in the state join the MARCS (Multi-Agency Radio Communications Trunking System), this would make the vehicle obsolete. He said, however, that this is not likely to happen for many years, if ever; the cost of MARCS is likely to keep many smaller agencies using their own radios for a long time.

In the meantime, he said, while the vehicle probably spends more time garaged than in the field, it’s still a valuable tool.

“Certainly,” he said. “Anything that didn’t cost us any money — and it didn’t — is worth having.”

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