After a deadly flash flood swept through Kerr County in central Texas this summer, rescuers combed dozens of miles along the Guadalupe River, looking for survivors. The grueling job was made more difficult because the radio system they needed to coordinate the response was not up to the task.
Some rescuers got busy signals. Others got garbled messages. At Camp Mystic, the summer camp where 25 children died in the flooding, there was little to no coverage. Temporary radio towers eventually were brought in to extend service into the disaster zone.
It was a frustrating mix of problems, made even more troubling because Kerr County had just spent $7 million to overhaul its radio communication system. But the deficiencies were no accident: The new network installed by Motorola Solutions excluded about a quarter of the county’s sprawling territory from reliable coverage for portable radios, leaving dead zones around Camp Mystic and other areas along the river.
To identify the system’s shortcomings, The New York Times digitized proposed coverage maps for Kerr County, reviewed contracting records and obtained data about the radio network’s performance through public records law. The Times found that a nonprofit public utility had also sought to bid on the project and had proposed more extensive portable radio coverage that would have reached more than 90 percent of the county’s territory, including the Camp Mystic area.
That alternative system proposed by the utility, the Lower Colorado River Authority, would also have offered more capacity. And it could have been cheaper. But Motorola won the contract anyway, aided by a process that was tilted in the company’s favor.
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