Chicago Fire Commissioner Robert Hoff on Friday defended his decision to delay the switch to 5,000 digital radios — even after a federal report blamed a shortage of radios, in part, for the death of two firefighters at a vacant laundry last winter.
The Motorola radios were purchased in 2006 under a $23 million no-bid contract to prevent communications breakdowns like the one that contributed to six deaths at an October 2003 high-rise fire at 69 W. Washington St.
Five years after acquiring them, the fire department is using only some of the digital radios and only in an analog mode. After exhaustive testing, Hoff said he is still not convinced about the reliability of the digital frequencies or the number of transmitters.
“In a hazardous environment, wearing a breathing device inside a building, digital frequencies come in garbled and broken up in some cases. It was not reliable,” Hoff said Friday. “Is it safe for us to just throw the radios out there when we haven’t tested them to make sure they’re safe?”
Gary Schenkel, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, said he expects to launch a “pilot transition” to the new digital system this fall and complete the switch next year, giving every firefighter a radio.
“This is not a commercial, off-the-shelf product we can just hand to firefighters and expect it to work. It takes a tremendous amount of work to create, test and validate a system that will work in a deep urban environment,” Schenkel said.
On Dec. 22, 2010, firefighters Corey Ankum, 34, and Edward Stringer, 47, were killed and 15 other firefighters injured when the truss roof collapsed at an abandoned laundry at 1744 E. 75th St.
In its report, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says only five of the 13 firefighters inside the laundry at the time of the collapse were carrying radios, and only one of the five reported using the radio to issue a “mayday” call. The federal report recommended that every Chicago firefighter be equipped with a radio and trained on its proper use.
Hoff insisted that more radios would not have saved Ankum and Stringer.
“This was not a case of a firefighter cut off, lost or unable to communicate,” he said. “Each member at that fire was in close proximity to another member who had a radio. People who were trapped couldn’t get to their radios. But people were next to them and knew where they were.”
