Chief Lombardi at Vision 2024: FirstNet Made a Difference After Hurricane Helene

By James Careless

Hurricane Milton’s assault on Florida was on the minds of attendees at the 2024 Vision FirstNet Users Summit (Vision 2024), even though the Public Safety Broadband Technology Association (PSBTA) held this event at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas October 7-10, 2024.

Chief Don Lombardi — Fire Chief of West Metro Fire Rescue in Lakewood, Colorado — was one of those attendees, as well as a speaker during the Keynote plenary session entitled, ‘Interdisciplinary-Inclusive-Interoperability Leadership Panel’ on October 8th. As it turned out, Chief Lombardi and fellow speaker Indianapolis Fire Department Chief Ernest Malone had one thing in common. “Chief Malone and I are both sponsoring agency chiefs for FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams,” said Chief Lombardi. “I have Colorado Task Force One, Chief Malone has Indiana Task Force One. And both of our teams were deployed to Hurricane Helene.”

In their plenary session, Chiefs Lombardi and Malone discussed the importance of FirstNet for enabling joint operations between first responder agencies, and for fostering strong relationships to make these operations work. “It is imperative that our folks there have constructive communications not only with each other but with local and state officials,” Chief Lombardi told AllThingsFirstNet.com. “We then have to get real-time information back to the federal government and our task force headquarters, so that we can make the best decisions and planning choices as we go along, and FirstNet enables that as well.” 

According to Chief Don Lombardi, FirstNet really came through for FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue teams during their Hurricane Helene operations. “FirstNet provided us with that reliability, the robustness of what the FirstNet network brings so that we could do a lot more than just make telephone calls,” he said. “With FirstNet, we have capabilities with the internet, we have capabilities with mapping; we have capabilities with being able to upload searches that we’ve done. As well, we had to upload a lot of our operational stuff, and the fact that FirstNet could do this was instrumental to our success.”

Ironically, the onslaught of Hurricane Milton meant there was no time for these teams to rest. “With Milton coming in, we had to transition to get our Urban Search and Rescue Team from Asheville, North Carolina down to Florida,” said Chief Lombardi. “And we had to be able to communicate all the way with them because we’re doing a personnel swap to increase the size of our team down there. So we have to coordinate that greatly, which taps into what was said during the Vision 2024 Keynote plenary session. We talked about the importance of developing relationships prior to anything happening, having seen the benefits of such relationships already play out during Helene and now Milton.”

FirstNet has also paid off for West Metro Fire Rescue in many other instances. One of these was the 2021 Marshall Fire, which killed two people and numerous pets, destroyed or

damaged more than 1,000 homes and dozens of commercial structures, and burned over 6,000 acres in Boulder County, Colorado. “When a lot of the infrastructure was down because of the winds and the grass fire moving so rapidly, FirstNet was able to come in and drop some of their mobile cell sites in there, restoring communications really in a quick fashion,” Chief Lombardi said. 

Then there was the June 2023 hailstorm at the outdoor Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver, where nearly 100 people were injured. “There were about 9,500 people on site, and when the hailstorm hit many of them jammed up the commercial cellular networks by sending out messages, photos and video,” said Chief Lombardi. “Fortunately, because our agencies are on FirstNet, we were able to communicate seamlessly despite that network congestion. And when we had to communicate with Emergency Management, the county emergency managers, with law enforcement, and the hospitals, we were able to do it without any problems.”

It would be an understatement to say that FirstNet is useful to West Metro Fire Rescue. “We use it all the time,” Chief Lombardi said. “Initially we split our mobile connectivity acrossVerizon and FirstNet/AT&T. But after AT&T came in and did a lot of enhancements to their cell towers and put in more, their coverage is super good — which is why we’ve gone exclusively with FirstNet.” 

These positive experiences with FirstNet motivated Chief Don Lombardi to come to Vision 2024, as well as speak at this event. “We’ve had great experiences both locally and with our FEMA task forces at the federal level,” said Chief Lombardi. “FirstNet also steps up during our wildfire scenarios. So all told, FirstNet has been really helpful for us, which is what we wanted to articulate to people here at this conference. And from what these people have been telling us, they’ve had similarly positive experiences with FirstNet too.”

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