Floyd County’s new communication system in action

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Floyd County’s new public service communications system is up and running and so far performing as planned.

“Law enforcement’s been using it probably for the last month and a half or so,” said Jason Webster, the county Emergency Management Agency coordinator.

“But we wanted to wait until the Rockford tower went online to switch over for fire and EMS because of the paging,” he said, referring to the new 300-foot radio tower built on county-purchased property near the Fossil and Prairie Park Preserve.

The new radio equipment that law enforcement received “worked great throughout the county,” Webster said, “but paging was still iffy on the old system, so we needed to wait until Rockford went through.”

The Rockford tower went live Thursday, March 6.

Dispatchers received training from the system vendor last week, “and we switched over totally for fire EMS, search and rescue, Friday evening at 6 p.m.,” Webster said.

The project – financed by about $5 million in general obligation emergency communications bonds issued by the county in the fall of 2023, provided new handheld radios for all law enforcement officers in the county, new pagers for firefighters and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) personnel, and radios for squad cars and for firefighters to use on the scene of a call, as well as updated equipment and software for the county dispatch center.

The equipment remains the property of the county, and the agencies that received items have agreed to maintain them and replace them if necessary.

The project is nearly complete.

“We’re still waiting to get a good portion of mobile radios installed in vehicles. That’ll be about the last hurdle to clear,” Webster said.

The supplier, Motorola, has a third-party vendor driving around the county this week, testing that the radio signal provides at least the 95% reliability that the contract calls for throughout the county.

Earlier this week Webster said, “They’ve got one day under their belt, and we got a report on that a little while ago and I think that they were like 99%.”

So far using the new system as been “pretty awesome,” he said.

“We had a structure fire in Nora Springs this morning,” he said Tuesday from his office in the courthouse. “And sitting at my desk I listened to the radio traffic and the paging go out. I was able to actually hear Nora Springs fire get paged out, whereas before that wouldn’t have happened from my desk.

“But then I hear EMS get paged out as well, and Nora Springs in-route traffic when they were leaving. It was pretty fantastic,” Webster said.

Floyd Volunteer Fire Dept. Chief Ben Chatfield said his crew used the new radios for the first time on a fire Thursday morning east of Floyd.