East Hampton's Emergency Communications Upgrade Nearing Completion

Completion of a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of East Hampton Town’s emergency communications system, begun in 2018, is drawing near, the Police Department’s communications technician told the Town Board on Tuesday, August 13.

Edward Schnell told the board that a 20-foot extension to the radio tower at the Town Hall campus on Pantigo Road in East Hampton was completed and now extends to 199 feet, giving a clear line to towers in Montauk.

A new generator and propane tank were installed at police headquarters in Wainscott, he said, replacing a diesel generator. Uninterruptible power supplies, or UPS, an advanced version of battery backup that powers equipment until a generator comes on, have been replaced on their four-year cycle at the Town Hall and police headquarters sites, he said. A generator dating to 2001 and a propane tank at Town Hall are also being replaced. “Right now, we don’t have enough onsite fuel storage to last a long enough time,” he said.

A software upgrade, which is covered under the town’s contract with Motorola, is scheduled for December, Schnell said. “But the system did support both the president of the United States’s visit as well as the former president’s visit to Bridgehampton,” he said, referring to President Joe Biden’s June 29 visit to an East Hampton fundraiser and former President Donald Trump’s August 2 visit to a fundraiser in Bridgehampton.

Where 300 to 400 police and emergency personnel radios might be in use on a typical summer day, those visits saw some 600 radios in use “because we had state police, county police, parks police — everybody and their brother was out here,” he said.

A plan to mount emergency communications antennas and support equipment on an existing tower on Shelter Island, intended to maintain connection relay redundancies between a tower off East Lake Drive in Montauk and the town’s dispatchers in Wainscott, had to be abandoned.

“At the time, we believed Shelter Island owned the tower, and they thought they owned the tower and had exclusive rights to space on the tower,” Schnell said. “It turns out they sold it and they don’t.”

Instead, an existing tower owned by Greenport Village was found to be available. “From a radio’s perspective for microwave paths, it is a viable site,” he said, though it will require upgrades and reinforcements. An analysis of that tower is pending.

The Greenport tower is also important to maintain connection relay redundancies between a tower at Camp Blue Bay in Springs, to be installed in the fall, and the dispatchers in Wainscott. But because the signal path will travel over water, there is concern that signals will bounce off the water, causing time delays. “Space diversity,” or use of two or more antennas, will solve that problem, and will be in use there and elsewhere, Schnell said. “We try to have at every site a redundant path, because each site doesn’t work unless it talks to the core site at Town Hall.”

Motorola equipment has been delivered and is ready for installation in shelters, which are currently under construction in Virginia, with delivery expected in October. Site construction drawings have also been completed. Foundations and piping could be underway late next month, Schnell said.

“Once the building is in, they can do all of the antenna work on the tower, bring the cables from the antennas into the building and then connect to all the equipment inside,” he said.

New equipment could be functional in November.

Along with the tower at Camp Blue Bay, construction of an equipment shed at the tower in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods is to happen in the fall. “I hope to start in September,” Schnell said, in order to “give the concrete a little more time to dry, before we put an 80,000-pound building on it.”