Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2003 | 11:18 a.m.
In the event of a large-scale emergency, such as a terrorist attack, Clark County police agencies and fire departments would only have a limited capability to communicate via the current radio system.
Just before the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sheriff Bill Young said that establishing a joint communications system is a priority.
"One thing we're severely lacking is a viable, countywide, inter-operable communication system," Young said. "That's a pretty sad state of affairs."
"From my perspective, we (first responders) as a group would endorse it as our next public safety effort," he said, adding that any federal funds Metro receives should go toward setting up such a system.
The need was publicly illustrated last month when several city firefighters had to be rescued during the large flood in northwest Las Vegas, but couldn't communicate with Metro's search and rescue team.
Young's wife, who works for the city fire department, called Young on his cell phone and Young sent rescuers.
Clark County Emergency Manager Jim O'Brien said the "ability to convey hazards and risks is obviously key. ... If you can't pass message traffic from point A to point B, then you could have redundancies."
Deputy Chief Dennis Cobb said the county already has two frequencies that allow Metro's 150-megahertz system to communicate with other emergency agencies, which operate at 800 megahertz.
While it's important for first responders to talk to each other, he said, having everyone on the same system could pose problems if the system gets degraded or destroyed.
"It's better to link separate systems together so you don't put all your eggs in one basket," Cobb said. "My recommendation to the sheriff is for us to focus on getting as robust a link as we can" with every first responder agency in the county.
Metro is poised to receive a $250,000 grant from the state, and police officials will use that money to buy more repeaters to enhance their current system.
Another option is to completely overhaul the current communication systems so that all first responders for different agencies are operating on the same system.
O'Brien said that would cost between $30 million and $50 million.
The city of Las Vegas and Clark County have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for grants that would provide about $12 million toward such a system.
"We had to do two grant submissions, one involving infrastructure such as new microwave towers, and another for the tools we'd need, such as new radios for first responders," O'Brien said. "The Department of Homeland Security will look at the requests together and determine if we have met their criteria."
Henderson Police Chief Mike Mayberry also endorsed the idea of improving the system, saying: "We have to be able to communicate with each other better across the valley. That includes everyone from the the local police to federal law enforcement."
Nevada State Homeland Security Adviser Jerry Bussell outlined a communication system as one of the greatest needs for first responders in his testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism in August.
"An incident commander needs to be able to communicate with a number of organizations," Bussell said in his testimony. "For example, the Nevada Department of transportation, the water company, the power company, schools, the National Guard ... or the directors of security at our major hotels."
The need for a joint communication system and other emergency measures were magnified because five of the Sept. 11 terrorists visited Las Vegas in the months before the attacks.
Officials will probably never know if they were plotting to attack Las Vegas, Young said.
"We spent two years trying to answer that question," he said.
Earlier this year, a star prosecution witness at a federal trial in Detroit of four men who were believed to be a part of a terrorist sleeper cell testified that the men planned to destroy Las Vegas. Authorities found a videotape of the MGM Grand and Disneyland in their apartment.
Young said that to his knowledge, there has never been a credible threat against Las Vegas, although the Joint Terrorism Task Force, comprised of local and federal authorities, including Metro and the FBI, have checked out many different "bits and pieces" of information.
While Young said Metro officers can never drop their guard, department authorities decided not to conform with the Department of Homeland Security's color-coded terror threat alert system announced in March.
Initially Metro did, but it cost the department "tens of thousands of dollars," Young said, because some officers switched to 12-hour shifts and a command center was opened.
"While I certainly understand the need for uniformity, the alert level has been raised up and down several times without any real specific information as to what the threat is about," Young said.
"It doesn't make any sense to add 15 to 20 percent to our manpower. You can only cry wolf so many times before people stop listening."
The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency in charge of Hoover Dam, remains on heightened alert and will be indefinitely, spokeswoman Colleen Dwyer said.
Two years after the attacks, all long-hauling commercial trucks and buses with luggage are still banned from the dam out of fear that such vehicles could be carrying explosives, but trucks owned by companies that do business regularly in Nevada and Arizona can get permits to travel over the dam.
Checkpoints are in effect 24 hours a day on either side of the dam, Dwyer said. Officers conduct random searches of personal vehicles.
"With larger vehicles, it's a given that they will be inspected," she said, including motor homes and moving trucks.
Visitors must go through metal detectors to enter the visitor center. Visitors also used to have more access to the inner workings of the dam than they do now.
Las Vegas Fire and Rescue has also made some permanent changes to the way it does business.
Spokesman Tim Szymanski said not only have firefighters undergone specialized training in bioterrorism and anthrax handling, the most significant shift the department has made is "we have a heightened level of awareness."
The department used to allow visitors to come into the station to look at and ask questions about their equipment, but not anymore.
"We're more careful about releasing that information because we're not sure where it's going," Szymanski said.
People from other fire organizations who stop by the stations while visiting town must undergo a background check first to verify their identity, he said, because "we don't know if these people are who they say they are."
The department stopped selling T-shirts or any merchandise that looks official out of fear that people will pose as a firefighter during an emergency.
Much to the annoyance of local residents, the department also removed the addresses of fire stations from the Internet site out of concern that that terrorists could look up their locations online and target them.
Szymanski said he constantly monitors CNN, Fox News and the Weather Channel and "if something is going down, I give everyone the heads-up" via e-mail.
But their primary mission -- saving lives and property -- hasn't changed. When firefighters and rescuers respond to an emergency, they might not even know initially that it's a terrorist attack, he said.
"Whether it's a natural disaster, a man-made disaster of an act of terrorism, it's going to start with a 911 call," Szymanski said. "Your mission is to get those people out of there. You're still doing the same thing."
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