Many of us have been part of a texting chain, maybe it's you and your family members or it's you and a group of friends.

It's a way to get a group of people together and all on the same page.

It's that same principal that has brought emergency services fire, police and EMS to come together and join something called MARCS.

The Realty tower building explosion in 2024, the East Palestine train derailment and explosion in 2023, were all extremely dangerous emergency situations that required massive amounts of emergency crews on scene all working together. What they didn't have at that time though, is all of the people immediately communicating with each other on the same emergency radio channels

"We went down there and we didn't have any communications with most of the departments down there because everyone was working on different systems," said Ellsworth Twp. Assistant Fire Chief, Zach Williams.

But soon that will all change. Cities and townships all over Ohio are switching to something called MARCS, which stands for multi-agency radio communications system.

This state-sponsored system allows all emergency responders, like fire, police and EMS, to all use the same radio system.

"You're joining forces with all of the other counties across the state. You're merging all the towers in the system together and it creates a lot of benefits for local law enforcement agencies when it come to be able to communicate with each other," said Mahoning County Sheriff, Jerry Greene.

Up until now, communication with nearby departments took some work to tie together and that can be detrimental when lives are at risk.

"Seconds matter even in those cardiac events you're losing heart muscle it's crucial we get those calls dispatched quickly and crews out on the road quickly.  We're not going to have to rely on multiple dispatch centers to patch the channels together to make everybody to be able to communicate," said Williams.

This all seems like a no-brainer and something you would want a lot sooner. So why wasn't it? Well, there are a lot of different departments all using their own system that they've used for decades. Many felt it was too much money to change over to something new and frankly, they felt what they have was fine.
But now the state awarded $20 million dollars in grants to make sure all its counties tie into MARCS.

Each new radio system costs around $4,000.

Currently all the sheriff's departments in Ohio use it and it's expected within a year all police and fire will be part of it. Officials who like the system says it's the best way to organize the chaos the world throws at them.