Wyolink system installed at GPD

By BEN HOCKING
Reporter

Like in most areas of law enforcement, Police Chief Tom Sweet hopes that no one in Glenrock will be able to notice the new Wyolink system that was installed July 20.

According to Sweet, the main use of the new $63,000 system is for the local police and fire departments to be able to communicate more efficiently with other departments around the state in the case of a major disaster.

Sweet said natural disasters such as tornadoes or man-made disasters such as chemical spills from trucks traveling on the highways in Converse County have the potential to require a statewide effort from police and firefighters in order to resolve, something the Wyolink system would make much easier to coordinate.

“If it’s a catastrophic event due to mother nature or possibly a chemical spill, it has the potential to encompass a very large area (of Wyoming) and a lot of different agencies. (With the Wyolink system) we would have the ability to talk directly on the radio system with whoever we need to that was involved,” he said.

Prior to the installation of Wyolink, large scale disasters required officers and firefighters relying on contacting different dispatch centers from across the state in order to communicate with their personnel.

“If we have an incident when maybe we are trying to communicate with the fire department and maybe even Natrona County Sheriff’s Office or Converse County Sheriff’s Office, it just makes it a lot easier to do that instead of having to rely on dispatchers to relay information between our dispatch and the sheriff’s office dispatch, and then they would to relay that information to their officers,” Sweet said.

The money for the Wyolink system came in a grant from the state. Sweet said that without funding from the grant, a small community such as Glenrock wouldn’t be able to afford such upgrades to their systems.

“In the small communities such as Glenrock, it’s hard to keep (systems) updated and it’s very expensive equipment. It’s just not feasible to do that on taxpayers dollars. That’s why anytime we (upgrade with something like the Wyolink system) it got to be funded through grants.”

In a separate grant from the Emergency Management Coordinator’s Office in Douglas, the Glenrock Police Department was given money to purchase a new recorder for the dispatch office. The new piece of equipment cost roughly $13,000 and will make digital recordings of the radio traffic that comes through the dispatch office. Sweet said the old recorder was still working, but an upgrade was necessary to ensure continued quality recordings.

“(The recorder is) like any piece of electronics equipment,” Sweet said. “After you have it for so long things start to break down on it. It’s an older piece of equipment that was due to be replaced.”

All the money for both projects were funded entirely by grants.

This is part of the July 29, 2010 online edition of The Glenrock Independent.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.