Lightning strike a close call for Alachua Police Department

The City of Alachua narrowly avoided a disaster last Thursday when a lightning strike severed telephone communications at the Alachua Police Department (APD), including communications for the City's emergency dispatchers, for about five hours.

Normally, all 911 calls go through the Alachua County Combined Communications Center (CCC) and are then transferred or communicated to Alachua's dispatchers through telephone lines. However, when the lightning strike took down telephone communications at about 2 p.m. Thursday, APD was left using cell phones and radios.

Because APD upgraded its radio systems to a standardized 800 MHz earlier this year, Alachua's dispatchers were able to communicate with the CCC, and the Center was able to monitor Alachua's radio frequencies and dispatch officers.

Two grants and an anonymous private donation paid for the new system. The grants were both made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the federal stimulus package. Together, the two grants amounted to about $150,000. An anonymous private donation of $100,000 brought the total funding for the project to about $250,000.

Alachua was the last municipality in Alachua County to upgrade to the system, and had the telephone outage occurred just a few months earlier, Alachua would have been left “playing it by ear,” said APD Lieutenant Patrick Barcia Jr.

“Because we have the new system, we were able to work in a partnership that we couldn't before,” Barcia said. “We wouldn't have been able to record any of the 911 calls for legal purposes, and we would have had to do everything over cell phones, which of course then you have to deal with spotty coverage and all of those issues.”

CCC Communications Commander Ryan Lee said that although there was not an especially high volume of calls from APD's coverage area during the telephone outage, the new radio system helped streamline the process.

“Fortunately, we have the same radio system and were able to, with a single click, select their radio systems and dispatch the officers,” Lee said, “so it made everything a lot easier.”