The truck that allows various emergency responders to communicate with each other was largely inspired by problems police and fire personnel suffered during rescue attempts after the attack, when one type of radio could not talk to another, so that warnings could not be issued to everybody at once about the potential danger of the towers collapsing.
"We decided to solve the problem for ourselves in Hudson County," said Mickey McCabe, who serves several roles as owner and operator of an ambulance service in Bayonne, but also as a member of the county's Office Emergency Management.
In many parts of the nation, each emergency service operates its own radio system. But these are often spread across different radio: VHF, UHF or 800 MHz. In the World Trade Center police and firefighters using different equipment and different types of radio equipment could not talk to each other.
The McCabe truck handled this situation in several ways. The truck -- when sent to any location such as the ceremonies unveiling the 9/11 monument on the former Military Ocean Terminal in Bayonne or to a recent fire in North Bergen - issues radio equipment to all emergency people on the scene. This includes repeaters and mini-stations that allow known personnel to talk to each other easily. Secondly, the truck is equipped with patching equipment that covers all of the known radio frequencies and different equipment used and allows the truck to patch in one with the other. So that when some important bit of information must be communicated to everyone on a scene the truck has the ability to do it.
The transmission uses a radio repeater system run by the Essex County Sheriff's Department, which brings the systems together.
This has been an ongoing effort over the last two years, and though the truck has responded to various events recently including the providing communications to emergency services for the PGA tournament and the Portugal Festival, the memorial ceremony tested it in ways other situations had not, since the affair involved law enforcement and other emergency services from all levels of government.
McCabe said the truck was converted to this use by his staff, and because the vehicle is used throughout the county as part of the emergency response efforts, Hudson County gave the project funds to pay for the 60 portable radios the truck carries.
"The only people we couldn't talk to were the Secret Service guarding President Bill Clinton," said Joseph Konopka, deputy coordinator for the Hudson County OEM. "And we would have given them portable radios if they had asked." Secret Service radio frequencies are top secret. But numerous other emergency units were tied together by the truck, including the U.S. Coast Guard, Marine Police, state, local even police from various counties. The truck also provided radios to the 10 canine units that were employed to sniff out potential explosives.
"This took a lot of planning," said Frank Travisano the Deputy Chief for operations of McCabe Ambulance. McCabe said the truck, for a while, was the only resource throughout the county that could provide this kind of service, allowing fire, police, EMS and other bodies to talk to each other.
"If we had a lost child somewhere that required a lot of people to be on a scene, we could issue the radios to everybody so that they could talk to each other as they searched the woods," McCabe said.
He said the truck was deployed to West New York for the Fourth of July festivities there and to North Bergen to provide communications to units fighting a five alarm fire there.
At the end of each event, Konopka said, the staff does a report as to what worked and what didn't, and how to make the system work better in the future."
Coming home
For weeks prior to the unveiling of "To the Struggle Against World Terrorism," the monument to the victims of 9/11 and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Bayonne, Joseph Kosarowich called from his Florida home to find out the details, needing to come north to witness one of the more meaningful events in the history of the former Military Ocean Terminal where the monument is located.
When he finally got the details, Kosarowich, who turns 90 years old in January, made his way north. Although he retired from the U.S. Post Office in 1972, Kosarowich was involved in the dredging efforts that helped construct the base just prior to World War II. He had not come back to this area since the Tall Ships display in the mid-1980s.
While he Kosarowich came north to visit friends and relatives in and around Bayonne, he also wanted to see the base again, and to see the monument unveiled.
"I thought the statue was wonderful," he said. "While I don't particularly like Clinton and didn't come to see him, I appreciated being there, and I like where they put the monument.
He said he served as a deck hand on the dredging boats, one of about 20 people from Bayonne at the time. "I worked on the dredge for the Standard Dredge Company," he said. "I went down there to see if there was anyone I knew."
He said he believed the ceremony was appropriate and though he admired the statue during the 9/11 ceremony, he got a better perspective on it the next day when he was on the Staten Island Ferry.
Like many people attending the ceremony, he waited in line as bomb-sniffing dogs circled his car. "I don't know what they could smell but that was their problem," he quipped. "I didn't like the waiting. I couldn't sit still."
Although no longer a resident of Bayonne, Kosarowich said he thought the idea of redevelopment the back was "an excellent" one, and said that he had often found the end of the base one of the best places to be on a hot day. "It's breezy down there like it's coming out of a pipe," he said. "It's a good dream if you can develop the base. I hope they can pull it off."
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