Emergency communication system to link Bay Area cities

EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION SYSTEM TO LINK BAY AREA CITIES
[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, AUTHOR: Christopher Heredia]
Dozens of Bay Area police, fire and transit agencies will be able to talk to each other on a single frequency during a disaster, making the region the first in the nation to coordinate all its emergency communications systems, officials promised Tuesday on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Working through a joint powers agency, the authorities will spend two years on a plan to replace the patchwork of radio frequencies or spectrum whose flaws were apparent during the 1991 East Bay hills fire and after the 1989 earthquake. During those disasters, as in the response to Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, technology hindered so-called first responders from communicating with each other.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/11/BAM7S3KVN.DT...