If Sept. 11, 2001, was a wake-up call for government officials about the state of the nation’s emergency communications, so was last year’s Hurricane Katrina, one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. Because of the extent of the damage done to the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Katrina offers many lessons about how to build public-safety networks that can survive worst-case scenarios.

“The big lesson learned in Katrina was survivability of the network,” says Jerry Powlen, vice president for integrated communications systems at Raytheon, which sells radio systems to law enforcement agencies. “Everything got blown over, including cell towers. There was no gas to run generators. . . . There weren’t enough batteries, and radios couldn’t be recharged.”

With Hurricane Katrina, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

To begin with, Louisiana had not gotten around to building a statewide wireless network for public-safety applications as many other states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Virginia, had done. These statewide networks provide gateways that let radios from different vendors communicate, so that first responders from various cities, counties and agencies can talk to each other.

“With Katrina, the state of Louisiana was in the process of building a statewide wireless network and working with local parishes and New Orleans. But unfortunately, that network was in the planning stage and hadn’t gotten the funding,” says Mark Moon, corporate vice president for the government and commercial markets for Motorola, a leading radio vendor. “It hadn’t progressed in time when Katrina hit.”

Without a statewide network, there was no common wireless backbone for first responders to hook into when they arrived at the scene of the disaster.