The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Contrary to popular perception, the problem of disaster recovery is often not the lack of resources, but lack of coordination.

One key component to successful emergency response is a dynamic, direct and robust communications network -- a structure the United States had been missing. Key decision-makers turned a deaf ear to the problem until Hurricane Katrina made such an ostrich-stance untenable, and the United States had to learn the lesson the hard way. Yet a year later, improvements have been incredibly modest. During the next major disaster, experts say we should expect more of the same -- a lack of coherent, rapidly deployable, interoperable communications networks for first responders and the communities they serve.

In many ways, the state of U.S. disaster response is not too different from what we see in far less developed areas of the globe. Following the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck Pakistan, India and Afghanistan on Oct. 8, 2005, many problems faced by first responders were eerily similar to those experienced in Katrina's wake. According to one Indian IT expert familiar with the situation, "The machinery of government had difficulty getting and sending even a handful of satellite phones for use in the devastated areas. I don't know if any of them have fully ready-to-move transportable (airliftable) satellite video uplinks, which would certainly be very useful. Similarly equipment for receiving remote-sensing imagery in real time and GPS/location equipment [was lacking]."

Jeff Allen, a consulting engineer currently working in Liberia with Médecins Sans Frontières, was a key member of Radio Response and the Community Wireless Emergency Response Initiative following Hurricane Katrina. Both groups developed and deployed critical telecommunications and network infrastructure in the hurricane's aftermath.

In terms of U.S. scenarios for emergency communications and disaster response, Katrina provided a sobering example of what works, what doesn't work, and the lessons we could learn from the ensuing massive communications meltdown. Allen's on-the-ground experiences helping to coordinate telecommunications disaster recovery were presented to the FCC on March 6, 2006. This report is available online.


What Worked, What Didn't
Generally speaking, hands-on investment in disaster preparedness is both sorely needed and relatively lacking. Designing networks to be deployed in advance is one of the most valuable lessons disaster recovery workers learned. Caching equipment and training recovery teams are also critical to these efforts. Yet more than a year after the largest natural disaster the U.S. has ever faced, little has been done to improve communities' preparedness.

During disaster recovery, one of the most important elements is the organization of human beings. Thus, current initiatives to create separate infrastructures for "official" responders and the rest of the community are met with skepticism by those who have worked on the ground. "I have heard some vendors talking about municipal networks with VLANs [virtual local area networks] for public access and VLANs for public safety people," Allen said. "They tend to treat the public access as an add-on, or as a luxury that can be turned off when bandwidth gets tight. That's lunacy. Giving people the tools to work together and solve their own problems is way more powerful than giving 20 police cars full motion video over a wireless Ethernet system. Humans need low bandwidth and existing collaboration systems hosted out in the network to organize to help themselves."

Instead of improving communications, new emergency response systems often expand the gulf between responders and the communities they are supposed to help by creating additional technological barriers to shared use.

And while the technology stories that emerged from Katrina often focused on the glamour of certain services (e.g., video streaming, VoIP), tried and true applications like instant messaging (IM), private chat rooms and Web access actually worked best. "VoIP