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, which 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.
“With Hurricane Katrina, the federal guys showed up, but they couldn’t talk on the local guys’ radio system,” says John Vaughan, general manager of wireless systems for M/A-Com, a provider of standards-based radios and gateways for public-safety agencies. “Everybody who showed up in Louisiana to help had a radio, but they couldn’t talk to anybody else with that radio.”
Louisiana also lacked a backup plan if its radio networks were unable to function. Experts recommend building public-safety networks that can use satellite transmission when outages on the radio network occur.
“As demonstrated during Katrina, you have to have an operable system,” Moon says. “You need backup linking through satellite or public networks if the radio system is underwater and the backup generators run out of fuel.”
The satellite capacity available in the Gulf was limited, and no policies were established ahead of time to determine who had priority in using it. Federal officials, local officials and the media were scrambling to secure satellite bandwidth.
“There’s only so much spectrum out there, and there was no policy to direct preemption for priority users,” Powlen says. “This is an issue that affects more than just first responders. Search-and-rescue operations needed it. Relief organizations needed it.”
Government officials building public-safety networks are taking the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina into account as they build new systems. New York state officials considered Hurricane Katrina while planning its Statewide Wireless Network (SWN), a standards-based radio-backbone network that is being installed over the next four years.
“When Hurricane Katrina hit, there was a legacy system down there. We’re in a position to confidently say that what went wrong there, we feel very certain won’t go wrong here,” says Hanford Thomas, the SWN project director for the New York State Office for Technology.
“Each of the critical sites on this system have generator backup on emergency power without adding fuel for a minimum of seven days. That should give us enough time to get in and refuel,” Thomas says. “We are also constructing three cells-on-wheels [mobile units] that can go anywhere in the state. They would essentially become the regional coordinating points if we lose capability.”
