Chemung County in largely rural southern central New York grappled with faulty emergency radio communications over the Memorial Day weekend. Although the mobile radios and phones continued to work, 911 operators were unable to use the radio equipment at their desks.
The provider of the emergency radio equipment, Motorola, responded to Chemung County’s call for assistance and attempted to figure out the source of the problem. As Yahoo News reports, a battery problem at a local radio tower was determined to be the culprit.
“I had Motorola come in; they did big research into the investigation on why this happened,” reported Undersheriff Douglas Houper. “They believe there was an outage at Hawley Hill. Everything in the shelter up there has a battery backup that keeps everything alive until the generator starts, supposedly. What they determined is, ‘hey, it’s time for you to replace these batteries.’ I said, ‘ok, if that’s what needs to be done, we’re going to do that.’ So, we’re in the process right now, an emergency order, we’re going to get Hawley Hill taken care of first. We’re hoping this will alleviate this issue.”
Houper added that they were fortunate that no major calls came in during the outages. He also noted that the emergency radio system was never completely out of commission, but did experience multiple interruptions and connection issues.
Motorola continues to look into the faulty signal delivery and has been asked to consider installing a new back-up system. Houper said the county would take action to replace all the radio tower batteries within the next three years.
In his summary of the event, Houper offered assurances that the communications snafu never put the public at risk but would be corrected to make sure that future emergency calls are transmitted without a problem, according to Yahoo News.
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