A $40 million overhaul of Mobile County’s 911 emergency radio system may fall even further behind schedule after officials discovered key equipment cannot withstand the kind of high winds that regularly accompany Gulf Coast hurricanes.
The Mobile County Communications District, which oversees the county’s emergency dispatch network, learned this year that some of the microwave dishes installed as part of the new radio system failed wind-resistance testing conducted over the summer. Jeya Selvaratnam of Tusa Consulting told district officials the dishes, as currently designed, can only withstand winds up to 68 mph, well short of what a public safety system serving a hurricane-prone region should require.
Federal standards mandate that any communications tower built in Mobile County be able to withstand winds of 150 mph, and the towers themselves were constructed to meet that threshold. But the microwave dishes mounted on those towers were not built to the same standard, creating what officials describe as a significant vulnerability. A Category 1 hurricane carries minimum sustained winds of 74 mph, meaning even a relatively minor storm could knock out the system’s usefulness at the exact moment first responders would need it most.
The revelation frustrated members of the district’s board, many of whom pointed out that a storm-resilient network was one of the central selling points when the project was approved back in 2013. Only a handful of current board members were serving at that time. District director Charlie McNichol said his staff is now working to determine how the design flaw made it through review in the first place, though he cautioned that assigning blame would take a back seat to fixing the problem.
McNichol said he has already met with the regional sales team from Harris, the contractor on the project, to find a solution. According to McNichol, Harris has agreed to correct the issue at no additional cost to the district, and if the fix works as intended, it should not affect the project’s broader timeline. In the meantime, installation of mobile radio units for first responders is continuing without interruption.
Even so, the wind-resistance issue adds to a project that has already faced repeated delays. The system was originally supposed to be fully operational by this past September, but Selvaratnam said last week that a March 2017 completion date is now the earliest realistic target. The project was previously pushed back once in 2015 during contract renegotiations with Harris, and again this past summer amid what officials described as a data-sharing dispute between the district and Mobile County’s public works department.
Separately, the project has become entangled in a dispute over county land access. The district’s radio system relies in part on land controlled by the GUS Board, which maintains roughly 2,000 acres between Laurendine Road and Bay Road in Theodore. The property generates revenue through hunting and agricultural leases and also functions as an environmental mitigation bank for the county. The communications district uses a portion of the land to reach one of its radio towers, and in 2014 agreed to provide the GUS Board with 13 mobile radios in exchange for continued access.
That arrangement has since become a point of contention. At roughly $5,250 per radio, the deal would cost the district more than $68,000, and attorneys for the district have raised legal questions about whether money collected through residents’ 911 phone fees can be used to supply radios to county employees who are not first responders. The GUS Board itself has no direct employees, since most of its work is carried out by the county’s engineering department under the supervision of environmental services director Bill Melton, who said the board would ultimately decide who ends up using the equipment.
District attorney Jeff Hartley has argued the original agreement, brokered under a former county attorney, falls outside the board’s statutory authority. County Attorney Jay Ross has countered that the GUS Board, including some of its current members, already approved the deal and cannot simply back out now that terms have become inconvenient. According to Hartley, the GUS Board sent a formal demand letter over the radios last month, though no party has moved to restrict access to the property while a resolution is sought.