Disaster communications not ready a year after Katrina
There are many lessons to be learned in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but the public-safety communications problems cited in numerous reports likely will be repeated because critical issues are not being addressed, a first responder at the scene said during a panel at the IWCE/MRT Wireless Summit held last month in Charlotte, N.C.
“Things are not any better today than they were the day before Katrina hit,” said Ben Holycross, radio systems manager for Polk County, Fla., who spent a month in Katrina-ravaged Hancock County, Miss. “We are not ready as a nation, we are not ready as individual organizations, we don’t have the … transportable infrastructure we need, and we don’t have the trained personnel who are ready to deploy.”
Although post-Katrina communications have been the subject of reports from the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives and the FCC, Holycross said, many of the reports focused more on consumer-oriented issues than public-safety communications.
“The ones sitting inside the Beltway are assigning a couple of staffers who sit in cubicles to write some reports based on what’s coming out of CNN,” Holycross said. “The mud hadn’t dried out in Mississippi, and they had a 280-page report already. But … if you talk to the people who were actually there, their viewpoints were not represented in any of the reports that were put out.”
Holycross recommended that the president select a single individual to “fix” the public-safety communications problem and give the appointee the necessary authority to do the job. He also called for more self-contained, transportable communications systems, with the cost of those systems shared nationwide. Local taxpayers paid for Polk County’s 100-foot portable tower used during the aftermath of Katrina because federal funding was beyond its reach — a circumstance that should be changed, he said.
“Let me tell you: When the [liquefied natural gas] tanker pulls into the Tampa harbor and the terrorists detonate it, or when they set off the suitcase nuke at Disney World, guess who’s going to have to go into the urban areas that are getting all the money and pick up the pieces for them? The surrounding agencies that don’t qualify for funding.”