SAFECOM ’ s Interoperability Continuum

munications have posed a challenge. The first major improvement was the megaphone or speaking trumpet, which allowed an officer with a decent set of lungs to yell orders to firefighters over the din of the fireground. The first truly portable radios were introduced in the early 1960s, and firefighting took on a new dimension. Officers could command the fireground with radios and communicate both with dispatchers and on-scene units. Today the U.S. fire service is quite diverse, from rural volunteer departments to suburban combination departments to huge urban career departments, and each has a unique set of communications needs based on risks encountered on the job and funding available to address those needs. safecom, the Department of Homeland Security’s public safety communications and interoperability program, has created a lexicon of the various communications networks. This terminology includes the jurisdictional area network, or the day-to-day radio system that dispatches calls through the radio network within a jurisdiction; incident area network, or on-scene communications; personal area network, which is a firefighter tracked with a pass device, scba monitor, body-vitals reader or portable radio; and extended area network, through which radio dispatchers and chief officers communicate with other cities, counties or state agencies during a large incident that requires mutual aid, regional hazmat teams or other specialized resources. On a day-to-day basis, most departments dispatch on their jan using either trunking or conventional radio systems. Many departments create a fireground ian by switching to a radioto-radio tactical channel that allows on-scene units to communicate with the incident commander, who will talk to both the dispatcher and onscene units using multiple channels, multiple radios or other techniques. Therefore, from the time the 911 call center receives a resident’s call SPEECH IMPEDIMENTS While radio capacities differ, the basic issues that challenge fireground communications can be divided into two broad categories: operability and interoperability. By John Facella and Dirk Young FIRE