Officials in Patrick County, Va., are using federal funds to buy land in Surry County to build a tower that will upgrade 911 communications in the Ararat community.

“This is a way to improve emergency communications for our sheriff’s department, fire and rescue and our school buses,” Jonathan Large, who represents the Dan River District on the Patrick County Board of Supervisors, explained Tuesday.

An ample presence of rolling hills and deep hollows in Patrick, especially in its western portion, has long been a problem for the county concerning accessibility for emergency response which is dependent on radio signals reaching their desired destinations.

Large said the accompanying “dead spots” are a major safety issue for the Ararat and Claudville communities, and efforts to remedy the problem have been in the works for more than three years.

However, the Patrick supervisors think they have identified a solution, voting last week to purchase a one-acre site in Surry located off Long Branch Road using Homeland Security funding. The $45,123 involved will allow the land acquisition and construction of a 180-foot tower, with Large making the motion to proceed with the project.

The action had been recommended by the county’s emergency management coordinator as well as a Mount Airy business assisting the county with the project.

Large added Tuesday that the site in Surry was chosen after officials bypassed what they thought would be an obvious option. “We thought that you would put a tower on top of the mountain, which is the highest point,” he said in reference to upper-elevation areas of Patrick in the Vesta and Meadows of Dan communities.

But testing of fire and rescue channels from Meadows of Dan Elementary School and the Primland resort showed a mountaintop tower would not correct the problem with dead spots. A hand-held radio was used by someone riding around those areas, with no communication possible back to the county 911 dispatch center from locations in western Patrick.

Large said that officials decided on a tower at a lower-elevation site that will direct signals into the hollows using a directional antenna.

Along with meeting Patrick County’s need for improved 911 communications, the tower project will conform to the Surry County Zoning Ordinance due to being more than two miles from an existing tower on East Pine Street near Mount Airy.

The Ararat board member said some people in the county have erroneously believed that the new tower is aimed at improving cell-phone communications, which suffer from the same dead spots.

“A cell-phone company could possibly co-locate on this tower,” Large said, but he stressed that the project recently approved is limited to emergency-communications needs of county government agencies.

Contact Tom Joyce at tjoyce@mtairynews.com or at 719-1924.