The Federal Communications Commission will have trouble finding the person responsible for recent emergency radio jamming in York County without monitoring around the clock, an agency spokesman said Tuesday.
Unless, of course, officials catch that person in the act, something that almost happened on Sunday.
Local authorities believe a rogue radio jammer has plagued the town of Lebanon and a few other surrounding communities off and on since 2004.
The perpetrator fell silent earlier this year – not long after the Federal Communications Commission was first called in to investigate. But the jammer resurfaced on Sunday, following initial reports of a multi-vehicle crash with numerous injuries on Route 202 in East Lebanon. Rescue workers and police who scrambled to the scene to assess the accident found their scanners’ radio signal blocked.
When officials realized the signal was being interfered with, a dispatcher sent a message over the airwaves that the FCC was monitoring. The jamming stopped immediately. Bill Davenport, a spokesman for the agency’s enforcement division, declined to comment on whether the FCC was actually monitoring at the time and might be able to locate the jammer.
Davenport said he couldn’t talk about the case specifically, other than to say that the FCC is doing all it can to find whoever is responsible – and that such cases are difficult to solve.
While there were no fatalities in Sunday’s crash, 11 people suffered various injuries, and the jamming incident delayed ambulances for eight minutes, according to Lebanon’s assistant rescue chief, Jason Cole.
Had any of the injuries been more severe, that delay could have been catastrophic, said John Lavallee, assistant director of the Sanford Regional Communications Center, which dispatches for many York County towns, including Lebanon.
“In situations like this, seconds, not minutes, can make all the difference,” he said. “There is just no benefit to doing this. It’s pure deviance.”
Cole filed a complaint with the FCC in April, after radio jamming delayed firefighters who were responding to a mobile home fire. In May, officials said they had narrowed down the list of radios that might be responsible, but no arrests were ever made. By that time, the jamming had stopped.
Radio jamming is uncommon but relatively easy. If someone has equipment similar to that used by police and firefighters, they can find the active communications channel, hold down the talk button and render the channel useless for others. The penalty for radio jamming is a fine of up to $112,500 or, in some cases, prison.
Bill Farley of Radio Communication Management Inc. in Portland sells radio equipment to public safety departments, businesses and individuals. He said there are no limitations or restrictions on who can buy certain equipment, and anyone with general knowledge of how the radios work can program them to public safety agency channels and send out strong enough signals to override them.
“You can’t have two radios transmitting on the same frequency,” he said.
In most cases, disruption of signals happens accidentally. Someone tunes their radio to a channel they are not supposed to be using.
Farley agreed that catching jammers is difficult.
“You basically have to catch them when they are transmitting,” he said. “I guess there are ways to narrow down an area, but it’s not easy.”
With the help of monitoring equipment that triangulates radio signals in a given area, the FCC has been able to find some radio jammers. In 2010, a California woman was arrested after she interrupted public safety radio communications and threatened emergency personnel over the airwaves.
The phenomenon appears to be limited to a portion of western York County. Maine State Police Spokesman Stephen McCausland said he knows of no other incidents in the last decade or more where someone intentionally jammed an emergency radio signal.
Lavallee said jamming may seem like a harmless prank, but radio communication is essential to both dispatchers and on-the-ground responders.
‘When someone calls in an accident or a fire, they might not have the most accurate information,” he explained. “So, when first responders get to the scene, they often can update that information and help us figure out how to dispatch resources. Any disruption is bad.”
Staff Writer Eric Russell can be contacted at 791-6344 or at:
erussell@mainetoday.com
Twitter: @PPHEricRussell
Send questions/comments to the editors.
