GULF SHORES, Ala. – When rumors began to swirl about changes coming in public safety radios, Gulf Shores Fire Chief Hartly Brokenshaw knew who he had to turn too.

He immediately went to Battalion Chief Mitchell Sims who began a two-year long effort to study those changes and help decide what direction Gulf Shores needed to go in.

Sims’ work was recently rewarded when he was named firefighter of the year at the fire department’s recent banquet. Out of town at the time, Sims received the honor at a recent City Council meeting.

“About two years ago I just looked at him – he’s been good with the radios in the past, he really enjoys that part of it – I looked at him and I said ‘find out what it is, everything that’s going on and what do we need to do,’” Brokenshaw said. “He went over and above on it.”

Because of his extensive research into the subject, Sims became a resource for other agencies facing similar questions.

“I’ve lived this now for a couple of years,” Sims said. “Intensely. I’ve become passionate about it and saw something good and wanted to do something good for my guys to give them a strong radio system. If I can’t keep my guys safe, then they can’t go out and do their job to take care and save people’s lives.”

It wasn’t an easy road. Sims jumped into the world of narrow bands and megahertz and 700 radios. And finding federal grants to fund it all.

“We cast the vision of ‘wouldn’t it be awesome and wouldn’t it be much safer for our people if everybody was on the same system?’” he said. “As a result of that this countywide system is being built and the public safety agencies that want to come onto it will be able to do so.”

He says it was a learning experience from the beginning.

“It’s all because of something called narrow banding,” he said. “I’ve just always handled the communications for the fire department here. I’ve been here 27 years. Whenever it all started he came to me. I had heard about it but didn’t know anything about it.”

Sims, Brokenshaw said, ran down all the rumors and leads and essentially came up with a plan for getting the entire city’s system on a 700-band radio.

“He ended up there actually not only within the city in the county and actually within the state the person that everybody went to that had questions because he had already researched it all out,” Brokenshaw said.

The basic goal of the plan is “inner operability” or giving fire and police departments the ability to communicate directly with each other during emergencies.

“There’s a study done that shows there were 343 firefighters killed in the World Trade Center,” Sims said. “But there were only 100 or so police officers that were killed, or less. One of the reasons being that they got the May day call because the police helicopters saw the buildings heating up, glowing and could tell it was about to collapse.”

Police officers, on their radio frequencies, heard the May Day call and headed for the exits.

“Because the New York Police Department and fire department operated totally independent of each other, a lot more firefighters died,” Sims said. “This study showed that if the May Day had been heard by these firefighters, they believe that 120 or so of those may have survived.

“Inner operability became the big buzz word after 9/11.”

The City of Orange Beach used a $1 million grant to buy “the core of the system” about four years ago and other agencies in the county had to buy the basic handheld and car and truck radios to also get on the system.

The Gulf Shores police department used a grant to get the radios and went on line with the new system in April. Others are expected to sign on as grants are available.

The new system is expected to go on line on Jan. 1, 2013.

Eventually, Sims said, the system will also be able to transmit data as well.