Last week, several officials suggested the county transition to a new statewide communications system for first responders.

The pending upgrade is just one part of a larger move toward more efficient and collaborative responses to large-scale emergencies. When the new year opens, Mahoning County’s new Incident Management Assist Team (IMAT) will be available to all communities. Those involved in forming it say it is a long time coming and shows just how much things have changed in fire and emergency response in recent years.

Chip Comstock, Chief of Poland’s Western Reserve Joint Fire District, has been advocating for such a collaboration for 20 years.

“The chiefs in the county agreed with it in theory but it never got off the ground, so what’s changed?” he said. “It was heresy for a department to call another, but now people understand.

Particularly in volunteer communities, you may have to call two other departments. You may have to account for who’s working on the fire and where, and it’s hard for one or two chiefs to do that. We need to ensure we’re fulfilling the state and federal safety standards.”

In an article in “Fire Engineering” in 2005, Comstock noted, among other things, the dangers of pulling battalion chiefs and other supervisors out of their regular roles to fill positions like accountability officer, safety officer, and other oversight positions at a massive fire scene or other catastrophe when multiple departments respond.

For those kinds of functions to be properly met, he said, communities who intend to collaborate regularly need to draft specific written plans for when mutual aid will be called in, who will serve in what roles, how they will be notified and how they will communicate on scene.

Comstock said he was only ever thinking about large fires or crash scenes, but he realizes that what he was advocating for two decades ago was a system that could quickly mobilize all the right people in the event of any emergency. In other words, an IMAT.

“One of the things I did not anticipate was expanding it beyond the fire focus, like for a major incident at the Canfield Fair or downtown events,” he said. “It’s not operational yet, but once we get up and running, it will be a game-changing practice, it’ll be much more of a team approach across the county at the command level.”

COMMUNICATION AND COORDINATION

Fire and emergency personnel across Ohio, the United States, and even worldwide have increasingly turned to forming an IMAT or similar organization for just these purposes. Comstock and others say recent developments have made it clear that it’s no longer heresy to rely on each other.

“For one, technology has made it easier for us to work together, and that includes the proposed move to MARCS,” Comstock said.

The Austintown-Boardman-Mahoning County Council of Governments recommended last week that the two townships’ trustees and Mahoning County Commissioners approve the transition to the Multi-Agency Radio Communications System that will allow all agencies the council serves to communicate with each other as well as other police, fire, and EMS agencies statewide, including the Ohio State Highway Patrol and ODOT.

The move also will save users money on radio usage fees because the State of Ohio will assume the cost of tower maintenance that the council currently passes onto users through monthly radio fees.

Second, Comstock said, “We have fire chiefs that are more progressive now than ever and looking out for the best interests of their firefighters and their communities.” He said that realization also ties into the universal understanding that departments have fewer personnel.

“With the shortage of firefighters and EMTs, communities have to work together more than ever,” he said.

All of these concerns were emphasized when many local departments responded to the February 2023 East Palestine train derailment, the May 28 explosion at the Realty Tower in downtown Youngstown, and even a recent house fire in Ellsworth.

“Interoperability is huge,” said Zach Williams, assistant fire chief for Ellsworth Township and assistant dispatch supervisor at the Austintown 911 Center. “We’re constantly trying to patch radio systems together for day-to-day operations. Whether it’s a crash or large fire, it’s always extra steps to make it work.”

Williams said firefighters were using hand signals to communicate because their radios did not sync.

“It’s very unsettling to send somebody into a house that’s on fire and I can’t talk to them because it’s a different radio system,” he said. “It’s about to be 2025, we should have interoperability.”

WHAT WILL

THE IMAT DO?

The IMAT executive board consists of Chief Todd Baird of Green Township, the president of the Mahoning County Chiefs Association, Williams, Comstock, Mahoning County EMA Director Robin Lees, Assistant EMA Director and former Austintown fire Chief Andy Frost Jr., Boardman fire Chief Mark Pitzer, and Conner O’Halloran, assistant chief at the Western Reserve Joint Fire District and a captain at the Cardinal Joint Fire District in Canfield.

Williams said the IMAT will be organized into three branches — east, west and county-wide.

For an emergency on either side of the county, that side’s fire chiefs and all members of the executive board will respond.

O’Halloran said emergencies are generally ranked from 1-5, with five being least severe — the average small fire or ambulance call.

In tier 4, a department will call for mutual aid. In tier 3, regional resources are mobilized. Tier 2 is when the state gets involved — like the Realty Tower explosion. Tier one is a major hurricane or an event like the East Palestine disaster, when federal agencies get involved.

“The train derailment and the building explosion are really the main driving forces for this,” O’Halloran said. “We need an answer for medium- to large-scale incidents. They don’t happen often, but when they do, we need to have some level of organization. You need different levels of management to manage those resources.”

If, for example, 15 ambulances were called to an emergency downtown and just arrived randomly, there would be gridlock. Those situations also often require a mobile hospital and triage area, he said.

But the IMAT is about more than what is happening at the immediate site of the disaster. It is about making sure the first responders are able to quickly communicate with anyone who needs to be notified, like hospitals, and anyone who could help, like subject matter experts at Youngstown State University — a chemist or structural engineer, for example.

The communications plan the IMAT has developed means that one message notifies a lot of people very quickly that a situation has emerged that will require a large-scale rapid response.

With one message sent to the Tier-1 group, O’Halloran said, the IMAT can immediately and simultaneously notify YSU, all Mercy Health hospitals, including C-level management and attending physicians, Akron Children’s, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office, multiple local police and fire departments (including, Green Township, Poland, Canfield, Boardman, Austintown, North Jackson, Ellsworth, Springfield and Youngstown), the Ohio State Fire Marshal, the local fire chiefs association, EMT ambulance, Lane Ambulance and University Hospitals.

“So, if we have a high patient volume, Mercy knows to activate its emergency plans to clear operating rooms and triage space, imaging centers,” O’Halloran said. “From YSU, we have all of those Ph.D.’s at our disposal that we can reference, with whatever their expertise is. And that’s huge. That’s blending us all together to accomplish the same goal.”

O’Halloran said the IMAT is still developing even as it prepares to go live in January.

“A lot of it is figuring out where our gaps and roadblocks are and what agencies we’re missing,” he said. “We’ll want to include the health department. They’re hosting a tabletop exercise in January, so we’ll be a part of that, figuring out where our workflow issues are and where we can improve so when that emergency happens, we’re ready.”

In February, IMAT members will receive Type-3 All-Hazard Incident Management Team training from the National Fire Academy, a federally-funded program that will make the Mahoning County IMAT not just a valuable local resource, but a regional one as well.

Additionally, the IMAT needs to know when it is time to transition from IMAT operations to establishment of a longer-term emergency operations center, from which to manage the logistics of a problem that last several weeks, months or longer.

That designated building will be 700 Industrial Road, and from there, the IMAT leaders and EMA will identify the community’s needs and work to meet them — concerns like food and clean water, generators, transportation logistics, utilities, housing and more.

“Take utilities for example,” O’Halloran said.” In North Carolina (after Hurricane Helene), they had to rebuild a lot of utility networks, water, sewage, electric, so they had to identify how many contractors they would need to come in and do the work, rebuilding those utility systems.”

While it is in its infancy here, the IMAT is off to a good start.

Williams said it will operate within the state’s IMAT region 5, overseen by Jackson Township (Stark County) fire Chief Timothy Berczik.

Williams said Berczik was present at the IMAT executive board’s most recent meeting

“He was very impressed with the progress we’ve made in such little time,” Williams said. “He was very happy to see where we are and where we’re going with it.”