Radio communications in Coventry back online after severe weather
By: Brittany Comak
Email: bcomak@abc6.com
Twitter: @BComakABC6
COVENTRY, R.I. (WLNE) – Radio communications are back up and running in Coventry after Monday night’s severe weather.
Lightning strikes were to blame for knocking out radios for all of the fire stations across town, all while they tackled two separate house fires.
Instead of hearing the calls for the house fires on their radios Monday night, firefighters instead had radio silence.
“We had no radio communications in the town,” said Western Coventry Fire District Captain Robert Mann.
The lightning hit a main piece of the radio communications system and also sparked two house fires in Western Coventry all within the same time frame.
Mann found out when his dispatcher called him on his cell phone – “Asking if we were going to respond to the two fire calls he’d dispatched us for,” he explained. “Kind of was shocked at that phone call saying, ‘What fire calls?'”
From there, Mann says it was divide and conquer, with the firefighters making an impromptu phone tree using their cell phones to communicate instead.
Fortunately no one was injured in either fire, though the home on Williams Crossing Road sustained significant damage to the roof.
“I could see flames coming out from underneath the eave, and the house was smoking pretty good by then,” said the homeowner’s step-father Douglas Dwyer. “That was only within 15 minutes of the call.”
The crack of lightning was so loud, a family friend tells ABC 6 that the homeowner thought a tree had fallen on the house.
“I’ve been in the fire service a long time and I have to say that this is the first time that we’ve had multiple structure fires and a lack of communications,” said Mann. “So it was kind of an eye opening experience. Will it happen again? Hopefully not. Could it happen again? It could happen tomorrow.”
Mann says radio communications were fortunately back to normal late Monday night and everything was in good shape Tuesday.
He says in addition to using their cell phones there’s also a statewide inter-city radio system that also acts as a backup.
As for the family that was displaced from their home on Williams Crossing Road, a Go-Fund-Me page has been set up for them.
©WLNE-TV/ ABC6 2019
