By Brenna R. Kelly
Enquirer staff writer

If terrorists or tornadoes struck Northern Kentucky, police, firefighters and emergency medical workers wouldn't be able to talk to each other.

Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties have 69 law-enforcement and emergency-services agencies.

Because of incompatible and outdated communication equipment, many of those agencies couldn't talk to each other quickly and easily in a major disaster.

But a grant from the state office of Homeland Security could change that. Local emergency management officials applied for an $11.2 million grant that will allow them to build a communication system connecting every first-responding agency in Northern Kentucky.

"It'll give our first responders the ability to talk to each other more effectively and cross-patch frequencies," said Dan Maher, Boone County emergency management director.

"Our communications centers at this point can't even talk to each other except through phone lines," he said.

The federal department of Homeland Security has given Kentucky $26 million to award to first responders this year. The Northern Kentucky proposal would take nearly half of the state's pot.

"This is a very ambitious project, but we have been encouraged by our state homeland security office to pursue this," Maher said. "I think our chances of at least getting a significant portion funded are very good."

If the entire project is not funded this year, the project could be done in three phases, he said.

Should disaster strike, communication could save lives - not only of victims but of the emergency workers.

"Communication is very important. For example, in the World Trade Center firefighters didn't have the ability to talk to the police officers," said Bill Fletcher, Boone's deputy director of emergency management."Law enforcement was advising their personnel to evacuate the building, but that information wasn't relayed to the firefighters."

The result: 343 firefighters died when the towers collapsed.

If the grant is awarded, the first step would be to create eight inter-county sites that could make different radio bands compatible. That would cost $800,000.

The second step would be to connect the four dispatch centers - Boone, Kenton, Campbell and Covington - via microwave. That phase will cost $2 million.

The third step would be to replace the wire line system within the counties with a modern microwave system. Kenton and Campbell counties now lease wire lines from the phone company and Boone County uses an outdated microwave system. That project would cost $8.4 million.

Northern Kentucky will learn in September whether it will get the grant.

The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport's location in Boone County makes communication between agencies even more important. If a plane were to crash, police and firefighters from all three Kentucky counties, Cincinnati, and Dearborn County in Indiana would respond.

Today, those agencies would switch their radios to Boone County channels - which would quickly be overwhelmed. With the new system, all Northern Kentucky agencies could use their own channels.

"This is a huge issue for us right now," Maher said.

E-mail bkelly@enquirer.com