Emergency communications, wilderness preservation clash as frustrations mount over slow progress toward installing new towers
By Tim Rowland
After years of poor radio communications, first responders in Hamilton County have learned a few tricks. For instance, stationing an emergency vehicle at a high point between the scene of an accident and the emergency call center which allows the driver to relay vital information back and forth between the two.
But that strategy effectively takes a person and a vehicle away from the scene of the emergency in a county of limited resources that can ill afford to lose either, said Chris Rhodes, town of Arietta supervisor, who also volunteers for the local fire and ambulance squad.
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If they’re lucky, they’ll have some degree of often garbled communication with the dispatcher, but they aren’t always lucky.
“Every time we go out on a call it’s very hard to understand each other,” he said. “We had a motorcycle head-on [collision] where communication was nonexistent.”
Last week, Hamilton County supervisors asked Alison Webbinaro, the North Country’s regional representative to Gov. Kathy Hochul, to amplify their public-safety concerns in a region of high mountains, deep valleys and little in the way of communications infrastructure.
The communications problem, supervisors said, endangers police who can’t radio in a license plate during a traffic stop and endangers accident victims because at times first responders must leave the scene of the emergency to establish radio contact. It’s an issue throughout Hamilton County, said county supervisors chair Clay Arsenault of Long Lake. “We’re in a pretty united front on this one,” he said.
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Webbinaro told supervisors their “message is being heard,” and will be reiterated in Albany.
Communications setbacks
Communications in southern Hamilton County were also dealt a blow by the failure of property owners and the state to reach an agreement on a tower on Cathead Mountain, said town of Benson Supervisor Phil Snyder.
Snyder said the Cathead Mountain tower — which had already faced the need for a Constitutional amendment to permit an access road through a half-mile of Forest Preserve — is dead for now, although he hopes it can perhaps be revived at some point in the future.
Three tower projects are on the drawing board in southern Hamilton County, an expansive land mass in the heart of the Adirondack Park with fewer than four residents per square mile. One, in the town of Morehouse, is out for bid, but two others in Hope and Arietta have yet to provide an application acceptable to the Adirondack Park Agency.
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Rhodes doesn’t see them going forward anytime soon. Ninety four percent of Arietta is in the Forest Preserve, where tree cutting is prohibited. That leaves little ground where a tower could comply with park regulations and still be effective. “We just don’t have a lot of options,” Rhodes said.
Balancing act with wilderness preservation
The supervisors’ position clashes with groups whose mission is preservation.
“The beautiful, unbroken wild vistas and open space character of the Adirondacks are unique and precious assets, and they are worth protecting because they are part of what makes the Adirondack Park so special and incredibly valuable,” said Claudia Braymer, executive director of Protect the Adirondacks.
Braymer said the APA routinely permits towers and that the current permitting process is working as intended.
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“We do not need to compromise the scenic value of the Forever Wild Forest Preserve and other wild areas of the Adirondack Park by allowing visible intrusions on the forested landscapes of the Adirondacks,” she said. “There are no indicators showing that the agency needs to speed up its review process to handle the current number of applications that it receives.”
The APA has jurisdiction over any structure higher than 40 feet, said Keith McKeever, public information director for the APA. While emergency communications towers are held to a standard that is less strict than cell towers, they still must be substantially invisible.
Sometimes it’s a question of an extra 10 feet — that little bit of height makes the tower’s coverage effective but can also interrupt the vista of an unspoiled ridgeline.
This pits wilderness ethos against public safety, which in the park is a difficult choice to wrestle with, McKeever said. “We understand the limited options,” he said, “And we’re working with them on a solution that will meet their critical needs.”
The solution would have to be one that would provide full communications coverage, but also not be so obtrusive as to provoke any lawsuits. McKeever also noted that, to many, it is the absence of visible, man-made infrastructure in the wilderness that is what makes the Adirondacks special and appealing and a driver of the tourist economy.
Rhodes said communication has become an essential part of life, and the park has accommodated other adaptations of modern infrastructure, such as solar farms. “We are many years behind the times,” he said.
Photo at top: The view from the fire tower on Cathead Mountain in southern Hamilton County. The mountain was seen as a ideal place to site a communications tower, but the plan fell through in 2022. Explorer file photo by Gwendolyn Craig
It is not just poor radio communications. Cell service is non-existent in many parts of Hamilton County. Frontier, which provides internet service and telephone, has improved but is still unreliable. Repair crews take days and sometimes weeks to fix problems. So, when storms take out the internet, there is no cell service to fall back on — to work, stream or to call for emergency help.
Protecting the beauty of the park is important, but so are lives and livelihoods. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had multiple-day outages since we purchased our home in Indian Lake in 2008. Not a great feeling knowing that if there’s an emergency, there’s no way to reach help.
Cell service is non-existant in the Town of Benson where I live. As long as I have electric power & internet I do have cell service using a Verizon supplied Network Extender which really works very well. The problem is the frequent outages of both electric power and Spectrum or Frontier internet. When that happens you have no way to call 911 or anybody to even report the outage. I am considering purchasing satellite internet which may fix the problem as long as it works with my generator electric power. More expense but it does not look like the politicians have the will or ability to fix the problem. Hard to understand why trees are more important than lives.
As a work-around for the meantime, has there been a feasibility study on using drone technology in emergency situations to gain cellular reception? It seems a drone can be used to make “portable” wireless towers in some situations.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/sprint-turns-drones-into-cell-towers/
Wait until something happens in this area, something that has a real impact on the very thing they are worried about protecting. An accident involving multiple casualties such as a bus or a Haz-Mat incident with a spill that endangers the environment. As much as I despise seeing a tower in any type of forest or open space some things are justified and just necessary as we move forward.
The state legislature should work hard to allow more cell towers and radio towers. People rely on cell / radio communications. I wonder if something could be done to allow on state highways and major county roads.
We all want a clean an pretty environment but adding towers to places that already have roads does appear justified and a balanced trade off.
I wonder if anyone in albany is reading this