Emergency communications in Athens, OH are handled efficiently by its Simulcast system, which 911 Center Director, Teresa Fouts-Imler called the “Cadillac of VHF.” Neighboring communities have their emergency calls routed through MARCS (Multi-Agency Radio Communications System). The problem, as The Athens Messenger reports, is that Simulcast and MARCS cannot talk with each other.
“It offers great coverage in Athens County,” said Fouts-Imler. “The problem with the Simulcast is it doesn’t allow us to connect to our adjacent counties or the City of Athens, the City of Nelsonville, a state highway patrol or Athens County EMS or a helicopter that’s flying in to pick up someone.”
While the MARCS system is used in 77 of Ohio’s 88 counties, switching from one system to another can be expensive, and Athens is still paying off its investment in Simulcast. There is also a site leasing agreement with American Tower, which runs for another five years.
There have been discussions about obtaining grants to purchase MARCS equipment for Athens, but so far, prohibitive costs, particularly for volunteer fire departments, have kept that initiative from moving forward. For the foreseeable future, it leaves Athens and the surrounding areas struggling to make sure that important communications are successfully relayed to one another.
“What’s happening is when you’re disseminating these messages over two frequencies, the messages are getting missed,” Fouts-Imler told The Athens Messenger. “We’re putting the dispatch center in a probability of operator error. I know we had, we’ve had this happen in the past. They’re repeating the same message over multiple frequencies, and [the messages are] not being translated,” she continued, adding, “It’s kind of like the telephone game. You pass on the message and it doesn’t get disseminated correctly and it’s not in real-life time. If I need Murray City, I have to pick up the phone when I’m not answering the radio and not answering the 911 call to dial up there and say, ‘Hey, can you send Murray City over to me?’ And it’s just not operable.”
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