http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-radio6mar16,0,2400736.story?coll=stam-news-local-headlines
By Zach Lowe
Staff Writer
March 16, 2005
STAMFORD -- The crash of the city's main radio tower for three hours Monday night was an unprecedented failure that shows the urgent need for an updated radio system, police officials and technicians said yesterday.
Monday was the first time the main computer system and the backup computer failed at the same time, said Capt. Gregory Tomlin, one of the technology experts within the department.
All that separated the city from a total communication breakdown were four transmitters on the city's second tower and the wireless phones a few officers carried, experts said.
"What happened Monday is not supposed to happen," Tomlin said. "The system basically died."
The collapse knocked out all communication with the tower atop the Government Center on Washington Boulevard, officials said.
Emergency workers patrolling south of the Merritt Parkway have their radios automatically set to connect with the Government Center tower, which uses six communication channels, Tomlin said.
For three hours, emergency personnel flooded the four channels on the so-called "north tower" at the Long Ridge Fire Company on Old Long Ridge Road, police said.
Officials said the breakdown was just the latest sign the outdated system needs replacing. Police and firefighters have complained for years about dead spots around the city where communication with dispatch is fuzzy at best and impossible at worst.
The dead spots have popped up in more places as the system has aged, officials said. The problem was so bad by 2002 that the police department bought 21 Nextel wireless phones that officers could use in dead spots.
Many of those phones have been lost since then, and most officers on the road last night did not have them in their cars, Assistant Police Chief Richard Priolo said.
The city is planning to spend $16 million over the next few years on a system that will use as many as six towers.
"The bottom-line is the system is old and needs to be replaced," said Bill Callion, the city's director of public safety.
The police department requested $8.6 million in next year's budget to buy land for new towers and begin construction. The city's Planning Board cut that to $1 million because of budget restraints. Mayor Dannel Malloy added $400,000 for next year and met with the state's congressional delegation in Washington last week to ask for federal funds.
"We were approaching this problem with an urgency before Monday," Malloy said.
The project will be finished by 2008 or 2009, Malloy said.
On Monday, officers and dispatchers quickly realized they had to switch over to the north channel, but there were several minutes when the dispatchers were not sure of the extent of the problem and could not locate at least two officers, said Capt. Sue Bretthauer, who oversees the dispatch center.
"It was controlled chaos in here," Bretthauer said yesterday. "I'm sure it looked a little frenzied."
Bretthauer and Tomlin were at the Government Center yesterday for a Board of Finance meeting. They were there to tell the board about the radio system's flaws, they said.
Bretthauer said the dispatchers ran a series of tests to see whether their own personal computers had frozen up. They called out to firefighters to see whether they were experiencing a problem.
"When they didn't answer, we knew it was a problem with the whole system beyond just police," Bretthauer said.
Two computers do the bulk of the system's work, experts said yesterday. The first, the system manager, is a 15-year-old computer that regulates all radio communication, Tomlin said.
That computer freezes occasionally, but a second computer called a site connector can step in and run the system at close to normal levels, Tomlin said.
"Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you don't even notice when the first computer fails," Tomlin said.
Last night, he said, was the one time you did notice.
That's because the software glitch that crashed the main computer was so severe it also crashed the backup computer, Tomlin said.
Thomas Alessi, the engineer who maintained the system during the 1990s, said the crash also may have disrupted the "black boxes," individual transmitters that control the communication flow to and from each of the tower's six channels. The black boxes can often operate independently if the system fails.
"It sounds like a major malfunction," Alessi said.
The transmitters on the north tower were the only part of system that worked during the three-hour span Monday night.
Alessi and Tomlin said another catastrophic computer failure could knock out the entire system. "It's definitely possible," Tomlin said.
The tower was running again by 9 p.m. Monday night, thanks partly to a private consultant who drove 90 minutes to reboot the entire system, officials said.
But the crash revealed the system's flaws more starkly than ever before, officials said.
Joseph Tarzia, a Republican Board of Finance member who often clashes with police about funding requests, said a new system is essential.
"If one of my family members were a police officer," Tarzia said, "I'd worry, too."
Copyright © 2005, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.