During the recent removal of a 100-foot tower from the roof of the Sciences Library, Emergency Medical Services' radio was taken off the air for one day, forcing EMS to resort to temporarily sharing a frequency with the Department of Public Safety.
The tower, which was dismantled over the course of five days beginning Sept. 28, had become obsolete in recent years because the antennae it supported were mostly backups - except that of EMS, which was accidentally taken down along with the obsolete antennae.
Rhinehart Tower Services, the Columbus, Ohio-based contractors who removed the tower, inadvertently "cut the cables and took us off the air," said Richard Lapierre, manager of EMS.
Rhinehart was evidently un-aware of EMS's functioning antenna on the tower. "I guess they were under the impression that all the antennae on the tower were inoperable, but our radio (was operating)," Lapierre said.
As a result, EMS began dispatching through DPS's frequency. "That's our backup system," Lapierre said. DPS normally dispatches EMS calls, however, "we normally don't share a frequency with (DPS)," he continued.
"There was a huge negative effect due to this removal," wrote Christin Giordano '07, one of the senior emergency medical technicians for EMS, in an e-mail to The Herald.
Robert Perreira, associate dir-ector of Computing and Inform-ation Services, said the explanation for the accidental removal was that the EMS antenna "wasn't labeled" on the documentation of the tower, which is a picture of the tower diagramming to whom the antennae belong.
"Nobody notified us (that the tower was being worked on)" Lapierre said - adding that at the time that the antenna was cut off, "we immediately noticed there was a problem."
"The telecommunications people took care of it right away - the next day they put up another antenna," Lapierre said.
Perreira said a company called Cybercom was hired to replace the antenna. "It didn't cost (EMS) anything. It was paid for by the removal project," he said.
"Everything is back on track," Perreira said.
