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WASHINGTON — Imagine if Honolulu firefighters could examine the floor plan of a burning building as their truck raced toward the fire. Or if paramedics could send data on a patient’s vital signs to the emergency room before the ambulance pulled up to the hospital.

Imagine if a SWAT team could use handheld devices to view real-time surveillance video from inside an office building while a hostage situation unfolded. Or if, when a violent crime took place in your neighborhood, the police used a reverse 911 system to tell you right away about what had happened.

Using lessons that emergency responders learned in the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has its sights set on establishing systems that would enable such scenarios to take place in cities across the country. Some of the challenges to making it happen: Establishing a reliable communications network to connect officials across jurisdictions, enabling that network to handle huge amounts of data and figuring out a way to pay for it.

Building Blocks of Public Safety

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss remaining gaps in emergency communications. Sen. Daniel Akaka is a committee member but did not attend the hearing.

Committee chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) spoke about the New York firefighters who said that TV viewers at home knew more about what was happening in the World Trade Center than the firefighters who ran into the collapsing towers. He repeated Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s complaint that emergency communications after Hurricane Katrina were so poor that the head of the National Guard had no better resources that a Civil War general would have.

“(First responders) can’t handle the kinds of large chunks of data available to the average smart-phone user,” Lieberman said. “The average firefighter or first responder doesn’t have the capability that the average teenager with a smart phone has.”

Lieberman said while progress has been made, a major failure has been the federal government’s inability thus far to establish a digital communication network for first responders across the country.

He’s among a group of officials who want to set aside an unused portion of the airwaves for nationwide public-safety communications. The desired spectrum is known as D-Block, and it would enable agencies all over the country to communicate with one another and share data without facing the outage threats of an overcrowded public network.

“We have the opportunity to do that right now, and I think we need to seize it,” Lieberman said.

In Honolulu, Emergency Services Director James Ireland is proud of the system that first responders use. In the past several years, he says the city and county has enabled emergency responders from every agency to communicate on the same 800 megahertz system.

“So we have interoperability within the City and County of Honolulu,” Ireland said in a phone interview. “And we’re able to talk to the Fire Department, Ocean Safety, Police, and so on.”

In coming months, a spokeswoman for EMS says the system will be upgraded to comply with new national standards so that responders in Honolulu will use the same system as responders in California and other states.

“The difference would be that if there’s any type of large-scale event where we need additional resources, whether it be military or (responders from other states), that’s a national standard that everyone is going to be held to,” EMS Communications Supervisor Diana Chun said in a phone interview.

The Emergency Spectrum

But the 800 MHz system is not foolproof, partly because some commercial cell phones and private radio systems use the same spectrum. Emergency services officials say that when cell phone usage spikes during an emergency, such airwaves become overcrowded and less reliable.

Michael Varney, of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said a nationwide interoperable wireless network — the so-called D-Block — would be preferred.

“Off-the-shelf broadband systems, although (they) have some function, they lack the ruggedness, reliability and connectivity,” Varney said in testimony before the Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. “Commercial networks should not provide public safety control.”

The issue is contentious because some members of Congress have argued that the D-Block should be auctioned off to companies, with auction revenue used to support the public safety network. The has estimated such a network could cost as much as $15 billion to build.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey testified on Wednesday that the creation of a digital network exclusively for public safety officials, no matter how costly, is “absolutely critical.”

“A terrorist attack or a major catastrophic event knows no state or municipal boundary,” Ramsey said. “Major disasters (are) where we’re going to have problems. It’s going to be necessary for New York to communicate with Los Angeles or someplace else in a very timely and secure fashion. We’ve done the best we can to patch it up but nothing that comes close to a permanent solution… Commercial networks are not designed to serve our public safety needs. “

In Hawaii, state Department of Defense spokesman Lt. Col. Charles Anthony says there are back-ups to such network vulnerability that have been implemented in recent years.

“The general hardening of cell phone repeaters, so that in case you had a hurricane you wouldn’t have as many cell phone systems going down,” Anthony told Civil Beat in a phone interview. “Cell phones now are more critical than they were 10 years ago. In addition to that we have what we call COWs or cell on wheels. You can actually bring those in to boost the capability of cell phone signals, and that’s a capability that we have in-state.”

But the debate over whether first responders should have to share commercial airwaves continues. Earlier this year, White House officials announced President Barack Obama would endorse turning over D-Block to public safety. His administration, like the one before it, had previously supported . Cell phone companies and the FCC have supported the auction option.

Lieberman on Wednesday said he was pleased to see that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) proposed setting aside the D-Block for public safety (rather than auctioning it off with other segments of airwaves) as part of his debt ceiling plan.

“We’ve got the possibility of actually achieving this as resolution of this larger crisis in the next week,” Lieberman said, referring to the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline as “D-Day.” “That would be great. In this tenth year after 9/11, adopting this legislation is, I think, one of the best things we can do.”

Despite the gaps in emergency communications, Lieberman says the federal government has taken some major steps forward. One example: The appointment of an officer of emergency communications as a point-person in every state.

“Part of the cause of 9/11 was a failure of imagination,” Lieberman said. “We failed to imagine that anybody could try to do to us what the attackers did on 9/11… We’re in much better shape than we were 10 years ago.”