Australian Bushfire Communications
Challenges And Snafus for Fire Communications in New South Wales
by Kelly Andersson
| Kelly Andersson has written on forest management and wildlife issues, natural resources policy and politics, and big game hunting and flyfishing. She is currently a contributing editor with Wildland Firefighter magazine. This article is condensed for 9-1-1 Magazine from a report appearing in the January, 1998, issue of Wildland Firefighter. |
| Sidebar: NSW Fire Brigades |
| Related Articles: Victoria Police New Zealand Police Tasmania Fire New South Wales Fire |
| Photographs: (select thumbnail to view detail image) |
Firefighters burn off vegetation threatened by a bush fire near Grafton, NSW, in 1994. Nathan Van Der Muelen |
New South Wales Rural Fire Service tankers operate during an out-of-area task force at Grafton, on the state's north coast, during January, 1994. Nathan Van Der Muelen |
This article can be found on
page 52 of the July/August 1998
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
Emergency Services in New South Wales, Australia, overall, are a state responsibility. There is one police force, one ambulance service (run by the NSW Health Department), and two fire services - rural and metro. Rural Fire Service (RFS) units are put together by local shire, with firefighting operations directed by the fire control officer, who is a shire council appointee. All local units operate under the logistical and regulatory control of the Rural Fire Service, the coordinating body for all rural fire services in NSW.
Mutual aid is organized through a series of State Tactical Assistance Response Groups (STARGs), which typically consist of ten heavy Category One (1,000 gallon) tankers and about 100 firefighters (two 5-man crews per truck). STARG task forces are usually made up of units from several areas, assembled and dispatched as required.
Firefighters have traditionally encountered communication problems over the 309,500 square mile territory of the state. Attempts to solve the problem through the installation of a new radio network wound up causing even more problems. Radios from one area didn't work in other areas, channel overload caused headaches, firefighters were locked out of the system, and communications often ranged between dicey and dangerous.
After the disastrous bushfires of 1994, the NSW state government decided to overhaul the communications of all emergency services in the state. At the time, each service had its own controller at an incident command center. These controllers - for fire, police, or ambulance - would pass message slips to each other and then send out the dispatches to their units. Hectic? Yes. But no more so than what emergency services faced under the new Government Radio Network (GRN) system.
According to firefighters, communications during the 1997 fires were no better than during the 1994 fires, despite the new GRN system.
"It was worse," said Eric Berry. "We suffered so many lockouts that it became an absolute farce." Berry, secretary for the Gosford Branch of the Rural Fire Service (RFS) Association, is a firefighter with the Gosford RFS, The Bays Brigade. "Basically it's a huge mess," he said. "Back in 1994, each shire had its own radio frequency for the Rural Fire Service. These were all on VHF. One problem was the lack of a common radio frequency when working in a different shire. In Gosford we got around this by installing 100-channel VHF radios, which contained the frequencies for almost all areas to which we were likely to be called."
Graham Tait, a firefighter with the NSW Fire Brigades and RFS, explains that the GRN is a trunked radio system operating in the UHF band (416MHz). "The system, as its name implies, is used by many government agencies, including emergency services. The police have thus far avoided the changeover, much to their delight." Tait explains that the system aims to make the most use of the available frequency spectrum by allocating an available frequency to the next user. Other features include a connection to the telephone network and the ability to communicate with other agencies and users. But GRN users have been plagued with "radio-free zones" or dead spots in the mountainous areas, and too many users on too few frequencies has created a risky situation. "Bushfire blowup days are the perfect example of when the current GRN is going to fail," said Tait. "Currently we have RFS, NSW Fire Brigades, NSW Ambulance, and Sydney Water, all competing for that group of frequencies. Each one of these services needs to be able to pass messages immediately - but with frequent lockouts, and waiting long periods, this is becoming difficult."
Berry said this situation is exactly what firefighters predicted would happen before the GRN was introduced. Too many agencies using too few frequencies causes chaos in communications. "But what did we know?" he grumbled. "We're just the poor bunnies that have to use the network. At one stage it was standard operating procedure that our old VHF radios were to be turned on at all calls because we never knew if the GRN was going to barf without warning and stay gone. The old system was not perfect, but at least it worked."
One of the main arguments in favor of the new GRN system was that it would eliminate the chaos of a control room full of radio operators from all the different services. This was a good theory, but it didn't take into account that each emergency service has a different radio procedure. Some run closed nets, where all communication must go through the dispatcher. Others run open nets, where you can talk to anyone out there without going through dispatch. Another problem is the call signs and codes that vary from one service to the next. The fire brigades use codes, and the RFS units use similar codes in most areas - but not all of them. Ambulances use a different set of codes. Police use en-clair messages - no codes - and when you add interstate units to the radio traffic, you get chaos.
Because of the expense, some emergency responders have limited their radio units to just those in the vehicles. "None of our 20 stations actually have station radios," said Berry. "To monitor the radio, one has to switch the truck on and use the external speaker on that."
"The VHF system, while not perfect, at least was a lot more reliable than the GRN," Berry continued. "The major problem with that was found when working in remote areas. This sometimes necessitated locating a relay post on a high point of land to ensure that communications were possible. If one area is assigned a certain frequency or frequencies, then you can 99 percent guarantee that you will have to wait to pass your message while some wally from the electricity company - who has never heard of mobile cell phones - calls his wife to see if she needs some milk picked up on his way home. It would not be all that expensive to install some more useful VHF radios - like the 100-channel units - in the trucks, with a certain number of common frequencies. Then if task forces are dispatched to an area, they will at least have reliable comms. Fitting out small troop-carriers as mobile communications units is not that hard either. These can then travel with the task forces to their destination and set up at the local control center. If one is adding interstate units, then some modular radio packs, perhaps similar to army units, could be handed to each vehicle to allow common fire ground comms if required. If not to every vehicle, then at least to the task force commanders so that local problems can be worked on without necessarily having to go via the controllers."
The goal of the GRN system was that all emergency units in a particular area - police, ambulance, rural and metropolitan fire brigades, and the State Emergency Service (Civil Defense) - could be directed to the channel for that area, where they could all communicate with one control center over that channel. Given the long and dramatic history of bushfires in New South Wales, it's critical that such a communications system be functional for the users, taking into account their needs and input during both development and installation. Emergency services responders don't need emergencies of their own caused by communications failures.
