AUGUSTA — The fire hall in this tree-lined town 75 miles north of Helena sits two blocks off the main street, not far from the Western Bar and the local library.

Look one way and there’s nothing but prairie. Turn around and the Rocky Mountain Front stands up, fortress like, from the rolling hills marking the distance between ranches and rural county roads.

By all accounts, Augusta’s first responders cover a wide swath of terrain that stretches east and west from the Continental Divide to Cascade County, and north and south from the Sun River to Highway 200.

Covering several hundred square miles, it’s one of the largest and more rural districts in Lewis and Clark County. It’s also one where radio and cell-phone coverage can be spotty, posing a challenge to first responders.

Brad McBratney, chief of the Augusta Fire Department, said the department frequently runs on backcountry accidents, ranching mishaps and brush fires, among other calls.

The challenges posed by distance, rough county roads and communication gaps, he believes, are simply part of running a rural fire and ambulance district.

“It’s just a fact of life here,” he said. “A lot of ambulance calls are from people who aren’t from our area. Just getting directions from the person reporting the call can be hard enough.”

In many areas of the county, simply placing that emergency call may be impossible — that is without driving into town to find an old-fashioned land line.

Rescuers, too, have problems communicating, as radio coverage falls into so-called “shadows,” where the signal is broken by rugged terrain.

“We’ve had that happen many times, where people drive all the way into town to get help,” said Charlie Taylor, assistant chief of the Augusta Fire Department. “Personally, I feel the county and the sheriff’s department should pursue some agreement with a cell-phone company in conjunction with a paging tower.”

County officials have taken steps to improve radio communication, spending more than $6.7 million thus far to upgrade the local system.

The process began in 2000, when Lewis and Clark County voters approved a $1.7 million public safety levy, allowing officials to set aside roughly $125,000 a year for upgrades and improvements to the county’s aging radio system.

The project got another boost in 2004, when the Department of Homeland Security awarded the county a $4.4 million grant to further upgrade the system.

Contractors hoped to have that new system running by July 2005. By that December, however, they were still working out kinks, trying to get the technology to function properly.

In February 2006, county commissioners signed a $105,000 contract with Motorola. The money helped construct new towers close to Helena to help fix coverage problems.

“The Helena area is pretty well covered now,” said Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Cheryl Liedle. “But certainly, there are still some places where we don’t have as good of coverage as we had hoped.”

Indeed, the problem areas are far fewer than they were just two years ago. Yet the recent fire near Fort Harrison west of Helena exposed a new shadow off Highway 12 where cell-phone and radio coverage was either unreliable or didn’t work. There’s also a similar area just below Canyon Ferry Dam, which lies within the Tri-Lakes fire district.

From the very beginning, officials set out to install the new emergency radio system in two chunks, including the Helena Valley — the county’s population hub — and northern Lewis and Clark County.

While the system around Helena is pretty well functional, Liedle said, work is still needed in the county’s northern reaches, including Augusta, where some rescuers have grown frustrated with what they see as a lack of progress.

“They tell us every month they’ll have our radio tower up, and they haven’t done it yet,” Augusta Fire Department’s Taylor said. “There are a lot of us who feel we were used for that grant.”

Liedle said Taylor isn’t alone in his frustrations. However, she added, the issue isn’t as simple as erecting a tower and calling it good — though she admits she wishes it were.

In 2005, the state’s Homeland Strategic Plan called for the establishment of a Montana-wide public safety communications system. As a result, the directors of nine consortia within the state formed the Interoperability Montana Project, representing all 56 counties, seven tribal nations, and three state agencies.

The goal of the project was and remains to create a seamless voice and data system for public safety and first responders. But as the project has grown, it also has become burdened with an increasing number of regulatory hurdles, handed down, Liedle said, by various agencies including the Department of Homeland Security.

“We’ve got several different federal agencies involved with this and none of them are on the same sheet of music,” Liedle said. “They all have different restrictions and requirements that are often in conflict with one another.”

In fact, in their July newsletter, the directors of the Interoperability Montana Project, which includes members of Northrup Grumman — one of the project’s contractors — said construction on 14 sites had reached “an impasse because of changes in NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) requirements, budget issues, and procurement procedures.”

“All of a sudden, we’re having to do NEPA studies for something as little as a road washing out,” said Liedle, who chairs the Interoperability Montana Project. “The whole point was to put up equipment on shared sites so we could save money and work together.”

The flaws in the county’s original system were exposed after the 2000 fire season. The old analog system provided coverage for just 50 percent of the county. When bidding out the contract for the new system, officials set a goal of 95 percent coverage.

While reaching that coverage goal might be slower than first anticipated, some good things have come from the consortia process, according to Chris Christensen, supervisor of public safety services for the Department of Administration.

“We’re getting coverage we’ve never had before,” he said. “It’s coming together.”

Christensen said the new technology allows privacy on medical calls. Responders can encrypt their conversation, so eavesdroppers can’t listen to their scanner and gain information on who the victim is, and what his medical situation might be.

“The clarity is amazing, and if they need to transmit, they can encrypt their message,” Christensen said. “Scanner land isn’t going to hear it.”

Communications have slowly improved in recent years, even though some areas are still outside the radio system’s footprint. Agencies also have enjoyed greater cooperation, working to create a seamless system that crosses county lines and jurisdictions.

In Augusta, responders received new equipment, including new handheld radios, new pagers, and new mobile radios in trucks. A repeater was placed in a tower used by the Forest Service, helping improve communications until the county can erect a radio tower of its own, which it hopes to do this year.

“We found a site for the tower up there,” Liedle said. “We’re going through the process of approval and getting equipment moved up there.”

A new cell-phone tower in Lincoln also began operating this month. Erected by Alltel Wireless, the tower introduced cell-phone coverage for the first time in areas around town.

Bill Cyr, chief of the Lincoln Fire Department, said the cell service, while welcome, mainly covers Lincoln proper, and then fades as one leaves town. But just last week, he added, the department switched over to its new digital repeater, which seems to be working fine.

“I don’t have any complaints yet,” Cyr said. “We’re still in a wait-and-see mode. It’s up and we’ve got all our stuff in place. It’s been pretty user-friendly so far, and the paging system seems to be working just fine.”

Reporter Martin Kidston can be reached at 447-4086 or at mkidston@helenair.com.