AM Radio ‘Paramount’ for Public Safety, Says Seattle Fire Chief

As debate continues around the future of AM radio in vehicles, one of the country’s leading public safety voices is making a clear case for keeping it on the dashboard.

Seattle Fire Department Assistant Chief and SAFECOM Vice Chair Chris Lombard has spent more than 30 years responding to some of the most devastating disasters in recent US history – from the aftermath of 9/11 to hurricanes, tornadoes, and more. In that time, he’s seen firsthand how critical AM radio is when other forms of communication fail.

In this exclusive interview with Radio Ink, Chief Lombard explains how AM radio plays a vital role in emergency response at both the local and national level, why broadband can’t replace it, and what the consequences could be if automakers remove AM from vehicles entirely.

Radio Ink: Over your three decades in public service, how have you seen AM radio play an essential role in emergency response?

Chief Chris Lombard: As you said, I’ve been with Seattle Fire Department for about 30 years. During that time, I’ve been heavily involved in all kinds of events with Washington Task Force One, which is one of the 28 national FEMA urban search and rescue teams.

As part of that effort, I responded to New York after September 11th. I had the opportunity to respond to all manner of national disasters like Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Matthew. We’ve done tornadoes, we’ve done building collapses, we’ve done all manner of types of events. And so through that, we have been exposed to some of the carnage that happens during those events.

I think it was during Hurricane Sandy, I recall, that it was almost 25% of the cellular network for entire swaths of the country that was taken out. So public safety – for our messaging going out, public safety for our own messaging internally – has always tried to maintain what we call our PACE planning: our primary means of communications, our alternate means, and so on. Essentially, having these different stages of communication that we rely on.

AM radio has certainly been one of those elements that we use in partnership with emergency management across the country to get messaging out.

Radio Ink: Some of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act’s detractors have argued that mobile alerts or streaming platforms can replace AM radio because of cellular coverage. Have you found that to be reliable in your experience?

Chief Lombard: You know, as more and more people have switched to cell phones and broadband-type networks, that’s all well and good, but it’s very range-limited and it’s very expensive infrastructure. You know, regardless of who your cellular carrier is, that tower that’s half a mile away or a mile away is, you know, a one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half million dollar tower. That’s just to serve your little bubble. If that goes out, there could be hundreds, thousands of people that would have to be looking for some other way to get messaging – that’s radio.

There’s a lot of talk about satellite, but that’s just starting to come on, and not a lot of people have access to that. So we’ve always relied on AM radio as being very efficient in terms of cost infrastructure. A single AM radio site can cover a 100-mile radius instead of a one- or five-mile radius.

The other thing, too, that I think for us is differentiated – particularly in some of the hurricane and tornado-type areas – is that we’re able to get very local information out. We saw that with some of the devastation from the flooding and the landslides in the Carolinas, they needed to get messaging in a very local area from a very local area, and the broadband just wasn’t there.

Radio Ink: We’ve recently seen AM’s importance with the flooding in Appalachia and the wildfires in LA – every region has its own risks. How does radio factor into your disaster preparedness plans in Seattle?

Chief Lombard: So Seattle, the Pacific Northwest – we’re not a hurricane zone, as you know, but we are an earthquake zone. And, you know, everybody talks about the volcanoes up here and around the Pacific. So our emergency management and their planners absolutely factor AM radio in as an element of the big-scale disaster events.

The geography of the Pacific Northwest is pretty rugged. We can go from coast to 14,000-foot mountains, 8,000-foot passes, all within 20 or 30 miles. Then you can drop through the Cascades and get back out into big wide-open spaces. So the ability to just cover where all of the people are with broadband is just not a fiscal or logistical expectation.

And so AM is a big factor in a lot of our emergency management here in the Pacific Northwest – again, for the ability to be able to cover lots of area very economically. And then to be able to know that a lot of the public also has, again, very economically, access to AM radio – whether it’s in your car or in your house – all of those options are a lot cheaper than a smartphone, which may or may not work.

Radio Ink: You’re the vice chair of SAFECOM, the Department of Homeland Security’s public safety advisory group. In your role, how critical have you found AM access to be to our national security?

Chief Lombard: Oh, it’s paramount. What’s the old cliché? Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket? So our messaging – certainly from public safety’s perspective, from emergency management – has been you need to have a diversity of pathways to be able to get emergency messaging out. Because you don’t know where the attack is going to come from if it’s malicious. You don’t know where the problem will come from if it’s a disaster.

We see that with public alert messages that go out. I think most people at this point are very familiar with amber alerts or the emergency broadcast tones – we hear the testing that goes out over the radio. So our messaging through SAFECOM has been: why would you go with less capability than you have now, when the costs are negligible?

The experience is out there. People know where to go. People know what works for them. It’s a tried-and-true technology. Unless you have something cheaper, better, more efficient, and more reliable, why would you switch away from that? And we haven’t seen that. Hence, our support of continuing to keep AM as a key element in this bigger picture.

Radio Ink: So assume that AM radios are no longer available in vehicles in an emergency. What does that look like?

Chief Lombard: Well, frankly, there will be people who will not get very important, critical, maybe even life-saving messaging. Unfortunately, I think when it comes to elected officials, they’re weighing those trade-offs and costs. But who wants to be the one to select certain populations and say, either because you’re too rural, or because you’re in a different socioeconomic class, or because you’re wherever – we’re going to cut you out. Not because the infrastructure has gotten too expensive, just because it’s become inconvenient.

Radio Ink: I know as Chair of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Communications Committee, you all are working with the NAB on Capitol Hill in favor of the AM Act. How has that process been? What kind of reception have you found in DC?

Chief Lombard: We’ve seen very positive reception. I think when we explain it and just lay out the pros versus the cons – they’re hearing the cons from people that want to get rid of AM radio – but when we explain the benefits, I think most people are like, “Oh my gosh, this is so obvious.” A lot of people just don’t think about it.

And I’ll tell you from a public safety perspective, it’s good and bad. When people get so comfortable with an alert mechanism, you’ve done your job. They’re trained on it. They know it. They know where to go. They know where to go for the information. That’s as good as we can hope for in any kind of public alerting or public messaging.

So that’s the pro side. The downside is when they get that comfortable with it, people don’t really think about the infrastructure that makes it happen. They don’t think about the consequences if it wasn’t there. They just take it for granted. So that definitely lets us know on the public safety side – we’ve got to keep pushing, got to keep the issue front and center so that we can keep this key piece of the puzzle in play.

Radio Ink: So how can the broadcasters reading this work with their local first responders to improve that perception and keep radio’s importance in the forefront of people’s minds?

Chief Lombard: There’s an in-between group that I think is the key and that’s emergency management. So responders – fire and EMS, and even 911 – are dealing with our emergency management folks all the time. That’s emergency operation centers at a city, regional, or state level. They’re generally responsible across the country for doing the disaster planning. That’s also where a lot of your emergency messaging will sometimes come from.

If the broadcasters are coordinating with emergency management on that messaging, emergency management can also carry the reminders to the public as well. “Hey, here’s where we work with AM for your direct and indirect benefit.” I think that’s probably the key.

Radio Ink: What message would you personally send to lawmakers considering the continuance of AM radio in the dashboard?

Chief Lombard: Certainly, we – from the fire chief’s perspective and from SAFECOM’s perspective – have been advocates for continuing to keep AM radio as part of in-car radio.

We appreciate and hear what the electric vehicle manufacturers are saying, but we don’t think that the trade-off is worth it. When you look at what percentage of the population has and can afford electric vehicles versus what percentage of the population currently relies on this critical means of receiving important and timely information, the trade-off seems pretty clear to us that AM radio really should stay in your car radios.