Three Months After Minneapolis: Examining Wi-Fi's Role Following the Bridge Collapse

Rob Allen, Deputy Chief of Police for the City of Minneapolis: "On August 1, 2007 at 6:05 PM, a large section of the I-35W bridge collapsed from causes that were unknown to us at the time of the collapse. The freeway section [bridge span] is 2,000 feet. The collapsed section was 450 feet and 113 feet above the water itself; 114 vehicles were on the bridge at the time, and 88 were passenger cars. The rest were construction equipment. It was a jurisdictional nightmare -- a federal highway crossing a state bridge over a waterway....

"The city became the lead response. The fire department continued for 20 hours until police took over. The 911 center was inundated with 500 phone calls in the first hour, 50 of which were involved in the incident itself. Our primary focus was rescue of the injured. Fifty people were transported by ambulance in the first two hours. All told, there were 13 fatalities -- 5 immediately and 8 recovered under debris over the next 19 days.

"One of our first priorities was to create a safety perimeter so our rescuers could operate safely. We did a complete survey of the scene. In the event this had been caused by something more nefarious, we sweeped the area with bomb dogs and techs. The initial perimter was 2.5 square miles and was large and complex. The main north-south transportation route through the area was blocked off. We were blessed to have good wireless connectivity through 800 Mhz. We did not co-locate police and fire commands, so we hit the networking hard and used the radio communications. Our Emergency Operations Center [in the basement of City Hall] was located off site.

"Initially we had received 1,200 reports of missing persons, so one of the key investigative jobs was to locate these people. One guy was in a rental car, climbed up the riverbank, got in the plane and went home. He never notified Hertz. We had to track him down and make sure he was okay. The good news is that within 48 hours we were able to get the number of missing persons confirmed. The bad news is those eight that were pulled form the river. It was very intensive and involved hitting cell-phone Web sites to find the last cell-phone pings from potential victims.

"With a perimeter of 2.5 square miles, we really relied heavily on mapping software which we were changing as we found new hazards. But GIS is bandwidth intensive, and our satellite service couldn't handle the bandwidth involved. Shortly after, we were able to get a node for citywide Wi-Fi, and [USI Wireless] were hammering the site in terms of bandwidth. We brought down a plotter, so we were doing four foot-by-six-foot maps, high resolution, and they were coming off the plotter as fast as when they were networked locally.

"We asked if we could hook up some video cameras to have a sense of what the scene looked. There was tremendous use of computing power during the event, and it saved us a tremendous amount of human resources by being able to use that."

Lynn Willenbring, CIO, City of Minneapolis: "USI Wireless, in the first 45 minutes, did open up the network to complete free public access, and they