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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Saturday, August 24, 2002

Tom Ridge's information systems and technology guru had sat in on the meeting Ridge had had with the Raytheon people and had told Mike Byrne, the head of Response and Recovery and the man obsessed with getting interoperable communications for first responders, that he ought to try to get a look at the converted Chevy Suburban that Raytheon was touting as a first responder command vehicle. It seemed, he said, as if they might have come up with a simple solution to get different emergency two-way radios to talk to each other.

At a fire chiefs convention in San Francisco this afternoon, Byrne made a point of going to the exhibit areas so that he could check it out. He instantly fell in love.

"It's great," he told his staff when he got back to Washington. "It's so simple. This thing is a winner." Soon, Byrne would be working to assure that the specifications for first responder grants to local police and firefighting agencies included provisions for the purchase of a vehicle matching the Raytheon model.

Neither Woollen nor Poza nor anyone else high up at Raytheon had any idea that the most important person in Washington when it came to launching their First Responder vehicle had just been sold, and that his enthusiasm would be the key to their getting orders from local police and fire chiefs over the next few years. Byrne had simply asked the Raytheon salesman on the exhibit floor for a demonstration without introducing himself.

The Raytheon team would celebrate another, more visible breakthrough on Wednesday, when the Wall Street Journal featured the First Responder on the front page of its Markets section. It was a glowing article that quoted a captain in the New York City Fire Department's research and development unit as calling it "the most advanced technology in communications we've seen to date. You touch the police and fire, click enter, and they are linked on the line." The Journal added that both the New York official and the Arlington, Virginia, fire chief had recommended that their cities buy a First Responder.

Woollen, who was at Raytheon's Massachusetts headquarters that morning for another review, got congratulations all around. Finally, he was getting some traction. As of today they had only actually sold two vehicles, but it now seemed likely that they were on their way to building a business.

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill