By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — The rolling hills and hollers of Moore County create a signature backdrop for folks here in Lynchburg. But before the new Old No. 7 Tower came online, Moore County had an emergency communications problem — and most residents had no idea.
“It was mostly countywide,” says Metro Moore County Public Safety Director Jason Deal. “The farther you got out of town, the worse it was. Out towards Ledford Mill, you drop into the hollers. Basically, the farther you got away from town, the worse communication got.”
For public safety crews, that meant paramedics arriving on scene and losing radio contact. Handheld radios barely worked anywhere in the county. The mobile units mounted in trucks were spotty once you left town. If a medic got inside a house and found the situation was worse than dispatched, crews were forced to stop care to walk back to the truck to communicate with the rest of the team.
Metro Moore County Sheriff Tyler Hatfield describes a parallel problem from the law enforcement side. The old system had technical quirks that went beyond dead zones — console equipment at the communications center would occasionally lock up for 30 seconds to a minute, holding a channel open and preventing dispatch from responding.
“We may have been on a wreck and we’re trying to relay patient information back to the com center, or to EMS responding,” Hatfield says. “Do they have the correct equipment? Do they need to grab another unit? How many patients — do you have two, do you have five? Are you going to need to call in another crew? Those little things matter.”
For search and rescue operations near the Elk River — where every spring and summer brings calls for lost kayakers and canoes, sometimes in coordination with Franklin or Lincoln County — going on foot meant losing radio contact entirely.
“Our old system, we would get down around the river and you couldn’t get out,” Hatfield says. “On a mobile inside your vehicle, maybe. But as soon as you got out on foot, you couldn’t get out.”
{Editor’s Note: In February, The Lynchburg Times reported on the opening of the “Old No. 7 Tower,” a new communications site on Jack Daniel’s Distillery property that connects Moore County first responders to TACN — the Tennessee Advanced Communications Network. What we didn’t have space to explore then was the ground-level reality: what did communications actually look like before, what does the tower change in the critical first minutes of an emergency, and what’s still being built out? We went back and asked.}
What changes in the first 30 minutes
Both Deal and Hatfield describe the tower’s most immediate impact in the same terms: interoperability. The word sounds bureaucratic, but what it means in practice is that when something large-scale hits Moore County, everyone responding — local, county, state, federal — is already on the same system.
“When we have a big disaster, most likely our state partners are going to be involved,” Deal says. “Whether it be FEMA, Department of Health, TBI, THP. Now we’re all on the same system. My FEMA coordinator — no matter where he’s at in the state of Tennessee — he can swap to a channel and talk to me directly and start helping me. ‘I’m on the air. What do you need? What resources do you need?’ He can talk to me directly without having to worry about a cell phone picking up.”
Before, Deal says, the coordinator had to wait until Deal had time to answer a phone call — or drive to the scene in person just to begin coordinating resources.
For law enforcement, the shift is equally concrete. If a pursuit crosses into Bedford County, the new system hands off to the next appropriate tower rather than dropping signal. If deputies need to operate on a mutual aid channel with any agency in the state, everyone already has it programmed.
“We wouldn’t have to go to an incident command post to pick up a radio to be able to communicate with Tullahoma,” Hatfield says. “We could change banks in our radio and turn to the appropriate channel and talk to them directly on our own radio.”
Deal points to a real-time example that happened the day of his interview — an ambulance crew unloading a patient at Harton Hospital when a new call came in nearby.
“Before, our radios wouldn’t pick up inside of Harton, much less sitting in front of Harton — you had to wait till you left the parking lot to talk, usually,” Deal says. “We were able to communicate with them directly, instantly. ‘Hey, I’ve got a call pending. Are you available?’ They were unloading and said, ‘Yes, we’ll get right on it.’ They got there more quickly because they were already closer. And we were able to talk to them immediately.”
Deal’s shorthand for what happened: “We just went from a flip phone to a smartphone.”
What’s still being built
Neither Deal nor Hatfield describe the tower as finished work. The state is four years into a buildout it projects will take another four to complete across Tennessee. Moore County went from one tower in its coverage footprint to five — which means crews can communicate over longer distances and into more remote terrain. But the most significant capability coming is one that doesn’t exist yet in Moore County: direct radio contact between EMS and hospital physicians.
“The state also took on putting EMS and all the hospitals in the state of Tennessee on this system,” Deal says. “In the future, we’re going to be able to get medical control to Harton or to other hospitals immediately — instead of having to do a phone call, or stay by the truck, or wait till we get to Tullahoma before we can talk to the hospital. Eventually, we’re going to be able to keep the radio and talk directly to a doctor, one on one, from anywhere in the county.”
The practical consequence is measured in seconds and minutes. A paramedic managing a cardiac patient in one of Moore County’s hollers will be able to relay changing vitals in real time to an emergency physician — who can direct care en route and have a room ready on arrival.
“More heads-up notice,” Deal says. “We can call ahead, give the hospital more details as they change in route. So they’re ready to go when we get there.”
The cost structure
One element of this upgrade that often gets lost in the technical details is what it costs Moore County going forward. The answer, largely, is nothing recurring.
The Metro Moore County 911 Board invested $1 million upfront to upgrade its communications center and purchase radios for patrol cars and fire trucks. The tower sits along Tanyard Hill Road on land owned by the Jack Daniel Distillery and the distillery also contributed to the total cost. TACN provided ambulance radios and installed the tower equipment. From here, maintenance — including 24/7 remote monitoring, temperature sensors inside the equipment housing, and emergency repair dispatch — is the state’s responsibility.
“If anything goes wrong with that tower, it’s part of the state network and the state comes out and fix it,” Hatfield says.
The monitoring goes further than most residents might expect: if the internal temperature of the equipment shelter rises abnormally, an alarm triggers and a technician is dispatched to investigate.
Deal adds that the redundancy built into the network extends to physical disasters. When a tornado destroyed a TACN tower in Nashville, the state had it back online within 24 hours using mobile trailer-mounted equipment staged for exactly that scenario.
The system was funded this way by design. State legislation passed funding to cover TACN maintenance costs for 25 to 30 years — removing the recurring expense that had previously made the system unaffordable for small rural counties. Deal says he looked at joining TACN years ago and walked away because of the cost. When he looked again recently, the structure had changed.
“That’s when they were like, ‘Oh yeah, the state legislation passed — you don’t have to cover the monthly expenses anymore. It’s on the state.’”
What kicked the state into action, Deal says, was communication failure during the Gatlinburg fires. When state agencies mobilized to respond, the inability to talk across jurisdictions became impossible to ignore.
For a county of Moore County’s size, the outcome is straightforward: a $1 million local investment bought a permanent seat in a statewide communications infrastructure the county could never have built or maintained on its own. When the next major emergency hits — a tornado, a wildfire, a mass casualty event — Moore County’s first responders will be in the same conversation as every other agency in the state from the moment it starts.
“We haven’t seen what this system is going to do for us yet,” Deal says. “The clarity is the biggest thing we got out of it — we can talk everywhere now, pretty much. But the state’s just now getting started.” •
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