And nobody got hurt, this time

“And nobody got hurt,” is the tag line that a popular New York City TV sports reporter uses in a monthly film montage of bizarre sports incidents that include baseball outfielders running through outfield fences or ski jumpers missing their lift-off ramps.

The film clips often look like someone should have gotten hurt and didn’t, only by dumb luck.

Dumb luck may be good enough for sports figures but it’s not good enough for public safety.

Last weekend the forceful remnants of Hurricane Ivan deluged the area with four to nine inches of rain, prompting small stream and river flooding and days and nights of concern for residents in the path of predicted destruction that was to eclipse the disaster of Hurricane Diane in 1955.

Commenting on the storm, Pike County Emergency Management Director Roger Maltby said another Diane would not be as catastrophic in today’s Delaware Valley as it was in 1955, as today’s communities are zoned and projects are reviewed for flood- plain exposure and stormwater planning. In addition, much of the flood-prone southeastern end of Pike County today belongs to the National Park Service and is no longer inhabited. “Who cares if it floods?” he remarked.

But to our detriment other things haven’t changed. In 1955, the only way an emergency worker in the river valley could communicate with the county seat in Monticello was by hard-wired telephone. Forty-nine years later—after men have been to the moon, made Dick Tracy’s wrist radio a reality, developed wireless telephones that take and send pictures and provide internet connections—after all those advances in communications technology, Alexander Graham Bell’s hard-wired telephone still remains the only dependable means of voice transmission for emergency services in the Upper Delaware.

This situation is an embarrassment to the telecommunications industry, which has repeatedly ignored petition efforts and official pleas for cellular telephone service.

While private industry can hide behind the profit and loss issues in serving a growing but still sparsely populated area, there is no such camouflage for our county political leadership. Despite repeated pleas from the fire services over the course of many years, county government has allowed Sullivan County’s emergency radio system in the valley to languish in ineffective 1950’s torpor.

Last weekend, Lumberland Supervisor John LiGreci learned how badly the system works and this week has announced a determination to see changes made.

Highland Supervisor Allan Schadt also named communications as his “biggest problem” during the weekend flooding incident.

In past years, just getting the emergency radio discussion underway was as difficult as making connections out of the valley on an emergency radio. No one was interested in the extra budget costs, and more recently, no one wanted to shoulder the criticism for visually intrusive, but unquestionably necessary, communications towers.

Now we’ve had another near brush with disaster and our communications shortcomings have been highlighted once again. “Can you hear me now?”

Is this going to be the occasion when something gets done, or are we going to wait for an incident where lives are lost and we cannot sigh in relief and say nobody got hurt?

Dr. Punnybone

Down the road