Dangerous moments

Pittsylvania County recently learned a tough lesson.

After an automobile accident on Museville Road in Callands on June 11, the chief of the Climax Volunteer Fire Department called for a helicopter ambulance — but no one heard him at the central dispatch in Chatham.

Chief Tim Smith’s radio transmission was lost in the airwaves, overtaken by interference from a Virginia State Police station some 160 miles away in Richmond. The incident happened during the late spring heat wave and was a “weather-related anomaly,” Pittsylvania County Emergency Services Director Jim Davis said.

“He said he asked for it, but we never heard anything at all,” Davis said. “… When it occurred, it was blocking radio traffic on that (fire and rescue) channel, but we didn’t know it. It was quiet interference to us.”

Smith’s call for help may have been lost that morning, but the message has been heard loud and clear by the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors. The county has to upgrade its radio system by 2013, but the supervisors have given Davis permission to begin the long, technical process now.

The interference problem didn’t affect 911 calls from the public, just the ability of responders out in the field to call the emergency communications center in Chatham. But upgrading that system will be as complex as it is important.

Davis said the county will have to change radio frequencies. The new system will have to co-exist with a small city on the southern end of the county and two lakes on its northern end. It will have to integrate radios from the Pittsylvania County Sheriff’s Office, Virginia State Police, town police and the volunteer fire departments and rescue squads. And it will have to do that throughout a county that rivals Rhode Island in square mileage.

“That alone creates some issues for us to tackle,” Davis said.

But Pittsylvania County has responded correctly to last month’s radio interference problems between emergency dispatchers and rescuers in the field. Although the county has five years to fix this problem, it has already started work that will eventually make the county safer for everyone.