Editing Communication during the September 11 attacks (section)

====Interoperability====
The federal ''[[9/11 Commission Report]]'' included recommendations on communications systems used by police, fire, and emergency medical services (EMS) at the WTC incident.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|year=2004|isbn=0393326713|location=Washington DC|pages=397}}</ref> In the report and in appearances on television news programs, commissioners said the capabilities of communications systems lacked the ability to communicate across department lines. That is to say, police units could not communicate with fire units directly by radio. Ambulances could not talk with police units directly by radio. Commission member Lee Hamilton, in several television appearances related to a 2006 book on the topic of the WTC incident, reiterated this factually correct view.

=====Aviation assets=====
An example that was cited by Hamilton: during the incident the Police Department helicopter was unable to communicate with Fire Department units in order to warn them of the towers' imminent collapse. The NIST document suggests the helicopter may have been able to offer several minutes warning. "Several minutes" may have been enough to get some people from the lower floors outside. This warning of imminent collapse went out over at least one police radio channel but there is nothing showing it was relayed to other people or channels. FDNY operates at least two communications vans: one of which was brought to the scene at the WTC incident.<ref name="World Trade Center Disaster 2004"/> The Commission report reveals the primary FDNY van was equipped to talk to NYPD helicopters but the backup van (which had no NYPD helicopter capability) was in use on September 11, 2001.<ref>"Heroism and Horror: FDNY Command and Control Outside the Towers", ''National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States'', (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2002) pp. 302.</ref>

In practice, many US helicopters used in emergency services are equipped with radios that allow communications on nearly any conventional [[two-way radio]] system, so long as the aircrew know the frequency and associated signaling tones. The radios usually have presets, like a car's broadcast radio, that allow some channels to be configured ahead of need. There was no information in the Commission report suggesting NYPD helicopters had such a capability.

=====Cross-department=====
While it is technically possible to implement communications across departments, doing so introduces a host of new training and [[Incident Command System|incident command]] problems. These are problems that would need to be managed in addition to the existing set of issues present at any large incident. The ability to maintain command, and monitor the safety of, groups working at an incident is diminished if a group of firefighters cannot be reached because they've switched over to the EMS channel. This could cause people to be sent to rescue them when there was no need. Similarly, if the Manhattan EMS dispatcher can't reach an ambulance because they are on one of the fire channels, patient care is affected. New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, appearing on the ''Charlie Rose'' show, expressed his view that the existing radio systems performed satisfactorily during the WTC incident. In his view, the [[interoperability]] desired by the 9-11 Commission was not needed.

=====Need for NYPD/FDNY cross-department links?=====
These problems are not new to the World Trade Center incident; cross-department and cross-discipline communication has been a hotly contested and long-identified issue. For example, at the [[Oklahoma City bombing|Oklahoma City federal building bombing incident]], the inability to communicate among departments was also cited as a problem. Firefighters heard an evacuation order on their radio channel because of the reported presence of a second bomb. Police and EMS workers reportedly did not know of the order.<ref>See: "2.1 Introduction", ''California EMS Communications Plan: Final Draft'', (Sacramento, California: State of California EMS Authority, September 2000,) pp. 7.</ref>

In [[Hurricane Katrina]]'s wake, a sergeant in the [[Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries]] appeared on national television to describe not being able to reach persons from other agencies who were assisting with the recovery. She described seeing the people in a nearby boat but not being able to communicate with them.<ref>See: ''Now'', Jump Start Productions LLC, September 16, 2005. The sergeant's main problem was the catastrophic failure of communications networks in the wake of the storm. The view that the catastrophic system failure was the most significant problem was echoed by Lieutenant Governor Landreau on the program.</ref>

Even if the technical problems are solved, the issue is more complicated than just adding radio channels or talk groups. It is also a cultural problem. In one local incident, a large number of officers from three police agencies were fielded to search for a violent criminal who had evaded officers from one of the agencies. The officers did not coordinate by switching to a shared radio channel. After the incident, one participant said the users thought their radios were incompatible and did not understand how the shared channel worked.{{Citation needed|date=May 2008}} This possibly reflects a training problem or a technology literacy problem. The problem seems to have been remedied since then.{{Citation needed|date=May 2008}}

In another instance, a fire agency had thoroughly trained for interoperability scenarios. During an incident where two agencies with different radio channels responded, a decision-maker said personnel from his agency would stay on their own channel.{{Citation needed|date=May 2008}} Decision-makers may occasionally act in unpredictable ways, even if technology literate and well-trained. It is not solely a technical problem, but an operational problem as well.{{citation needed|date=November 2012}} Changes to [[Incident Command System|ICS]] command structure, or operational changes in how the command post for an incident is set up, may produce better results than buying equipment or adding channels. Sometimes there are interoperability problems even where a structure for interoperability exists.{{citation needed|date=November 2012}}

=====ICS: part of the solution?=====
One view of the Incident Command System is that units across department lines would communicate with their own representative at the command post or division level. That representative would relay any needs to another department. For example, a fire unit requesting five paramedic ambulances would identify the magnitude of a medical problem to their fire officer at the command post. This request would add to their commander's operational picture of the division or incident command as she called EMS to request the ambulances. Situation awareness is an important part of effective command and is easy to lose at a large incident. Bypassing incident commanders can contribute to a decomposing of command.

=====Trunked systems, commercial services, and cross-department netting=====
One approach to cross-department netting is the capability of some modern [[Trunked radio system|trunked systems]] to provide a function called ''dynamic regrouping''; a feature that Motorola doesn't support in simplex (e.g. 'fireground') operations. It is therefore necessary for a disaster to be near enough the infrastructure to allow for repeater access/operation. Many agencies with Motorola trunked systems already have this capability. The feature allows the dispatch center personnel to send units from different agencies who are responding to the same incident to a common talk group or virtual channel. This assumes the agencies all share a capability to operate over the same trunked radio system, which is rare. In an informal survey of three agencies with trunked systems that included this feature, users at two sites reported they did not think their system included the feature. A representative from a third site said he "...thought they had the feature but never used it." Of the three agencies with the feature, no one knew how to use it. Like other disaster readiness processes, users would have to practice using the feature in order for it to be useful during an incident.<ref>Dynamic regrouping is described in ''800 MHz Trunked Radio Request For Proposals'', (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: Public Safety Projects Office, Oklahoma City Municipal Facilities Authority, October 19, 2000) pp. 99. In systems where this feature is not available, a work-around is to program every fielded radio in the radio fleet with two or three identical fleet-subfleets or talk groups. By doing this, any two radios could meet and communicate.</ref>

Some agencies use commercial two-way radio as an adjunct to their own communications networks. One professional engineering evaluation of public safety radio systems explains that commercial systems such as Nextel's are not built to the same standards of [[Signal strength|coverage]] and [[Network traffic|non-blocking]] as public safety trunked systems. Like toy walkie talkies marketed to children, they are usable and helpful for non-urgent communications but should not be considered reliable enough for life safety uses.<ref>''Contra Costa County Public Safety Mobile Radio Master Plan, Final Report, June 18, 2002, '' (Fairfax, Virginia: Federal Engineering, Inc., 2002).</ref> It is also true that most trunked radio system users are likely to hear busy signals, (error tones showing no channels are available,) for the first time during a large disaster since all systems have a finite capacity.

"We don't want or need trunking" is what Chief Charles Dowd (NYPD) was heard to say at an APCO convention in Orlando (2006).{{Citation needed|date=September 2018}} NYPD operates a large, conventional repeater network with many legacy channels in the UHF band; and a technology developed "so a large number of users can share a small number of channels" (e.g. trunking) is clearly unnecessary and a frivolous waste of money.{{Citation needed|date=September 2018}}