EH Fire and EMS radio system now on the ‘MARCS’
Several area officials met with a team from MARCS at the tower site to discuss exactly how the tower operates. It took a great deal of cooperation and teamwork to get the tower funded and in place.
For many months John Schlabach, East Holmes Fire and EMS chief, has been working to have a Multi-Agency Radio Communications System tower built and a new radio system put in place that will be advantageous to many different parties throughout the county and well beyond, even to the borders of Ohio.
The effort recently paid off with a new MARCS system finally in place, bringing the addition of a 400-foot tower erected south of Berlin on County Road 120.
Recently, Schlabach met with MARCS field operations manager Dick Miller and Arlin Bradford, who serves as MARCS programmer and electronics specialist, along with Holmes County engineer Chris Young and Jason Troyer, Holmes County Emergency Management Agency director, to share how MARCS will serve a significant role in allowing East Holmes Fire to utilize a much-improved radio system.
Schlabach said its current VHF system was put in back in 2013 with three towers located near Berlin, Millersburg and Nashville, through which ran all the public safety operations including the county engineer, townships, the sheriff’s office, all fire and EMS departments, the Holmes County Health Department and more.
“That system is now at end of life, and Motorola no longer makes new radios to be compatible with that system, and they no longer offer any software or parts, so we knew we were going to have to look long-term to solve this,” Schlabach said.
Recognizing many surrounding counties, other fire and EMS departments within the county, and the sheriff’s office had turned to state-operated MARCS, Schlabach said East Holmes began looking into the system.
The problem was the two MARCS towers are on the edges of the county, which was a deterrent, and because of that, EH didn’t have the same quality of radio coverage as was provided by the old system.
Schlabach said as the lone fire and EMS entity in the county not on MARCS, he realized they needed to make the move, but the lack of a local tower remained a major disadvantage.
“There was a safety issue,” Schlabach said. “The radio system is one of the most important tools we use on every call. We rely on volunteer response, so with us covering part of five townships with 45 volunteers, it’s not unusual for our volunteers to respond direct to scene.”
That was the top purpose in the department seeking to fix the infrastructure before pursuing teaming up with MARCS.
Thus began the process of finding a way to fund and build a local tower that would sufficiently serve the needs of the department.
In order to secure the necessary funding, EH Fire & EMS took its funds created from its annual fish fry and fireman’s festival and teamed up with the Holmes County Engineer’s Office and MARCS to find grant funding for the tower project to move forward.
The process took time, but it was done properly and worked out to benefit everyone involved.
“That partnership was the only way we were able to get this project done,” Schlabach said.
The result of the partnership was the implementation of a new system that includes a 400-foot-tall tower south of Berlin, which will now host an interoperable program designed to improve public safety.
MARCS was created in 2000, and the company has since built a network of more than 370 towers across the state.
“This is another tower addition that will add coverage and capacity,” Miller said. “We currently have more than 3,100 agencies and more than 152,000 radios on the system, and they are all able to communicate with ease.”
This becomes important because when a disaster occurs in another county that requires mutual aid because of the magnitude of the disaster, all possible responding agencies are quickly able to communicate and respond, sharing vital information that helps organize the concerted effort.
The MARCS radios allow users to communicate with clarity in the loudest of environments, designed to explicitly pick out the human voice from surrounding noise.
“It’s all about communication,” Miller said. “That is what interoperability is all about. Everyone has to talk in a time of crisis, with everyone working together for the betterment of everybody. I wholeheartedly agree that Holmes County got better with this new tower. But guess what? Every MARCS user in this area got better with that tower. It’s a huge win all because of the partnership.”
Bradford said there also is a portable system that can be moved from site to site and used as a deployable unit that only enhances the capabilities, only it limits communication to a localized area.
There are three of those units housed in Columbus.
Miller said this system has been well thought out, and when a crisis arises, that is when the system is at its best.
Schlabach said the entire process took more than 20 months to come to completion, and the department is now investing in training its members on how to utilize MARCS.
He said without the partnership of MARCS and the county engineer’s office, the project never would have been possible.
“Putting sites in like this is not cheap,” Schlabach said. “We used a lot of local contractors to install the tower, and the county engineer team did a lot of the work themselves. We were very frugal with our spending, and we always look for ways to give back to the community with our local fundraising projects, and this was one we felt was important and perfect to do that. Because in the end, it benefits everyone in our community. It helps us, and it helps all of the other agencies here and throughout the state.”
Troyer said he is thankful to have the opportunity to utilize the system when the next crisis arises in Holmes County.
“With that tower being erected, it not only helps East Holmes (Fire and EMS) stay better connected, (but also) it helps the sheriff’s office, state troopers, ODOT, the engineer’s office and everybody in the area communicate better and keeps us safer,” Troyer said. “From an EMA standpoint, what MARCS does is allows us to have interoperability. I can quickly bring resources in, and we can all be on the same communication system now because MARCS is designed to work with different resources. This is a very big benefit for Holmes County.”
Schlabach said mutual aid response will improve drastically with the new system, and EH Fire & EMS is excited to join the rest of the county and many others in the state in utilizing MARCS.