County supervisors address public safety communications concerns

source：www.rappnews.com

At the board’s June meeting, the public comment section was dominated by county fire and rescue volunteers complaining about the pager system, which notifies volunteers of emergencies, and they played a recording of an unintelligible call for the board members.

L3Harris will implement a 30-day program to make software updates and work through other remaining problems, with the goal of having most of the issues resolved by mid-August. The purpose of the program, Tangeman said, is to give customers confidence in the software by the end of the 30-day period.

Jackson District Supervisor Ron Frazier said that just before the Wednesday meeting, he was notified that the volunteer fire and rescue in Amissville was not receiving calls and their transmissions were garbled.

“So as of today, 12 noon, they can’t use them at all,” Frazier said of the pagers. “They don’t use them, they don't rely on them. So we do have a life-safety issue when the volunteers don’t get the calls.”

Tangeman responded that he was unaware of any current issue with the pager that would create a public safety concern. But, Washington Volunteer Fire and Rescue Chief Jonathan Bankston said that the difficulties in communicating is a life-safety issue. He said that because there are no radio towers in Rappahannock County, they have to rely on the towers in neighboring counties.

“We're relying off other towers outside the county and we have hills, valleys, things like that ... but it is a life safety issue for us when I was at a fire where we didn’t have communication,” Bankston said.

At the Fire Levy Board’s July 13 meeting, Sean Polster, who was recently hired as Rappahannock County’s emergency services/management coordinator, gave an update on his first impressions on the county’s emergency services operations.

County Administrator Garrey Curry said that this is a “historic problem,” but the board has been able to identify a couple of people at CenturyLink who have tried to address concerns.

Whitson said it seems like the telephone service in Harris Hollow is worse than any other location in the county, and he would like to see more resources in that area to update the infrastructure, such as finding public dollars to invest in better infrastructure.

“I'm not talking about general fund money,” Whitson said. “I'm talking about creatively going out there and trying to find some public dollars available generally for this type of infrastructure improvement and see if we can fix this. It is out of control.”