Loud and Clear: Grant helps four fire departments

Four local fire departments will no longer have a failure to communicate, thanks to a federal grant.

An effort initiated by Kimberly Fire and Rescue has resulted in a grant of $148,825 to upgrade radio equipment, and allow it to stay in touch more easily with the Warrior, Fultondale and Mt. Olive departments through a network of repeaters.

“We needed these upgrades to stay in compliance with the Federal Communications Commission, as well as with FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], and their requirements for interoperability with the state and other departments,” Kimberly Assistant Chief Greg Pugliose said. “They want everyone to be able to communicate with other departments in case of a disaster.”

In the past, Kimberly couldn’t communicate with neighboring agencies for a variety of reasons, including conflicting radio frequencies and lack of signal coverage.

In addition, the upgraded equipment financed by the grant will work with the new narrow-band frequency allocations from the FCC, which reduce the spacing between channels on the public-service radio band. That action will open up twice as many channels as before. “They were running out of frequencies,” Pugliose said.

The new network tying the north Jefferson departments together will also communicate with Morris, Gardendale, Birmingham and most other local fire departments. “That helps us respond with mutual aid,” Pugliose said.

Such a network would have come in very handy during last April’s tornadoes. “Fultondale was very limited – their phones were out, their radios were out. Something like this would have helped them a lot,” Pugliose said.

The new radio system will include two repeaters stations. Where those stations will be installed isn’t decided yet, Pugliose said.

Work on getting the grant began in earnest last September. The four departments put together statistics on response times and the like, and also discussed issues with terrain. Since Kimberly was the “host department” in the grant application, Pugliose put many hours into the grant application.

Kimberly is also about to get a new primary radio tower, though that had nothing to do with the grant. The original tower was taken out when a company repairing the firehouse septic tank knocked out a guy wire with its truck. The company’s insurance will pay to replace the tower with a similar model, but the city council voted recently to increase the new tower’s height to 130 feet – nearly twice that of the original.

“We have a lot of dead spots with our current radio, and the new tower will help get rid of those,” Pugliose said.

Now that the money has been approved, Kimberly must prepare and environmental and historical impact statement, so that the government can be assured that there will be no adverse impact on the environment, and also that no historical sites will be affected. Once that hurdle is cleared, the departments have a year to get things up and running.

The grant is from the Assistance for Firefighters Program, and is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The grant was announced last week by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), who worked for its approval.