ROGER ROSENBLATT: I don’t know much about public policy as a study or activity. I just always assumed that it had something to do with the public…

The heartbreaking, even biblical disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is compounded by the lack of communications. Millions are said to be lacking phone service of any kind. Landline and wireless phone service across the Gulf Coast from New Orleans eastward has been largely cut off, and restoring it will take weeks, if not months, reports the New York Times.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco blasted telecommunications providers for the apparent collapse of the state’s wireless network.

“The communications network is completely gone,” Blanco said Thursday as the situation in New Orleans grew more chaotic by the hour. Blanco said wireless networks throughout the state remained down, and that state officials were unable to use hand-held communications devices.

According to a memo from the Homeland Security Dept., “the telecommunications infrastructure in New Orleans, Biloxi, and Gulfport is considered to be a total write-off.”

As many as 750,000 BellSouth landline customers and millions of cellphone customers are thought to be without service across Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. With power still out in many parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, the switches and infrastructure that runs the telecommunications networks were operating on backup power, either batteries or generators.

About 80 percent of New Orleans is under water. The situation has descended into lawlessness and chaos, with people becoming increasingly angry and desperate.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint, the country s three largest wireless carriers, said cellular service has been severely affected.

“If we don’t have landline connectivity to our equipment at the towers, it doesn’t matter if it’s running,” said James J. Gerace, a vice president at Verizon Wireless. “Customers could be getting five bars on their phone and they can’t get through.” BellSouth, for instance, has 180 switching stations running on generators.

“This is not a normal hurricane restoration situation.” - Bill Smith, CTO, Bell South

Many of the New Orleans residents with a 504 area code have been unable to receive calls on their cellphones, even if they have left the region. All cellphones have a home switching office, which keeps billing and service data. When people call a 504 number, the disabled switching stations in New Orleans are unable to route the call.

Iridium, one of the country’s largest suppliers of satellite phones, said the amount of traffic from the region on its satellites had doubled since the storm and was likely to rise further.

The situation is grim:

• Entergy (News Releases), the power company for New Orleans, restored electrical service to more than 861,000 of the 1.1 million customers affected by Hurricane Katrina (as of September 17th, with some 230,000 still without power. Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company which serves 195,000 customers in 23 Southeast Mississippi counties, has hurricane news and outage numbers.
  
• The New Orlean’s police department’s citywide 800 MHz radio system went down as power was disrupted. Transmitter sites for the police radio system “are also underwater with the rising water and [are] now disabled,” according to reports.
• Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said they need additional frequencies, some 25, 800 MHz trunking repeaters, tower crews, 1,000 portable radios [and] three 100-foot tower trailers as well as additional staffed mobile command centers that provide satellite uplinks.
• Hurricane Katrina knocked out service at 19 of BellSouth’s central offices, which are reinforced bunker-like structures housing very expensive equipment that switch calls. Before Katrina, none of BellSouth’s 1,600 central offices nationwide had been rendered inoperable by a disaster. Some of its central offices remain flooded and expensive electronic switches costing about $5 million each were destroyed. So far, the company has restored three of its 19 damaged central offices. Until they are fully repaired, wireless-phone calling in the New Orleans area could be spotty.
• BellSouth, the dominant telephone company in the region, reported approximately 1.75 million BellSouth customers live in the area affected by Hurricane Katrina. The company is still trying to restore service in Florida.
• Bell South CTO Bill Smith said Friday that switching facilities in the flooded downtown area of New Orleans have survived and will be functional once the water is finally pumped out and power is restored. That could mean that phone service to New Orleans could be restored ahead of that in coastal areas where entire neighborhoods were flattened, along with the phone network, he said.
• Cingular’s press releases have network status and a cingularhurricaneupdates.com. They offer free calling stations at retail stores
• Wireless Companies Continue Work in the Gulf, says the CTIA, the wireless trade association. Challenges include inadequate security and fuel procurement and distribution. Wireless carriers have been working with federal, state, and local authorities to pass through police checkpoints to assess damage and deliver fuel and replacement parts to effect repairs. Coordinating with multiple jurisdictions has posed particular challenges.
• SBC Communications is installing a communications network in the Houston Astrodome for victims of Hurricane Katrina. It is providing refugees with up to 1,000 phones for free local and long-distance calling, as well as free wireless service with Cingular Wireless and Wi-Fi hotspots for public service workers and media.
• Verizon has “cell sites on wheels” (COWs) going to various locations to restore service. Typically, these trucks plug in to the existing wired phone network, but Verizon is prepared to use microwave transmission from one COW to another that has a landline connection. Verizon has a press release archive.
• Sprint/Nextel has an Emergency Response Team (ERT), deploying two large RVs plus several other support vehicles, including five SatCOLTS, or satellite cells on light trucks, to aid with restoration of government and emergency services. The ERT will come equipped with 3,000 Nextel Walkie Talkie handsets for those emergency services customers and organizations.
• Cellular South is the largest privately held wireless provider in the U.S. and licensed to provide wireless service - to a total population of more than five million people - on its network stretching from Memphis throughout all of Mississippi, along Coastal Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. They have been operating Free Call and Cell Phone Charger Centers. More than 90% of the Cellular South retail locations on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt are open with damaged centers in Gulfport, Biloxi and Bay St. Louis operating out of tents.
  
• New Orleans installed a city-wide wireless network that supports interactive cameras throughout the city. Verge is using mesh in its New Orleans Warehouse District network and providing roaming via Boingo.
• The New Orleans Department of Safety and Permits is using Accela’s laptop/tablet software for automating permitting, inspections, workflow, project management, plan review, code enforcement, and other critical functions. The application hosted off-site by Accela.
• Motorola has mobilized 2,500 pieces of equipment, including radios, chargers, consoles — “a huge list,” says Adrienne Dimopoulos, a company spokesperson.
• Nearly 10,000 satellite phones have poured into the hurricane zone to coordinate relief efforts by federal disaster personnel and Red Cross workers, said service providers Globalstar and Iridium. But satellite phones were spread far more thinly among the ranks of local public safety personnel and emergency responders.
• World Communication Center (WCC), a leading provider of global satellite voice and data communications, provided satellite phones to assist Mercy Corps in its multi-country tsunami aid programs. A new Iridium phone costs $1,495 and is the size of a cordless home phone. Older, larger models start at $699, or you can rent one for about $75 a week. Service costs $1 to $1.60 a minute.
• Thrane & Thrane and Nera make portable satellite terminals using Inmarsat available at SatphoneStore and other places. The World Teleport Association lists the major teleport operators.
• CapRock Communications, which normally provides satellite based voice, data, and video communications services for offshore oil rigs, commercial ships, mines, construction sites and government and military operations, is providing V-Sats to support the disaster recovery efforts in the aftermath of the storm. Lafayette-based SOLA Communications specializes in quick, deployable VSATs, often used in oil platforms.
• DIRECTV has launched a dedicated 24/7 Hurricane Katrina Information center on channel 100. The satellite television channel provides information on hurricane relief and recovery efforts for evacuees in shelters, as well as for DIRECTV viewers nationwide.
• T-Mobile’s HotSpots will be free at many of its nearly 66 locations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama which have not been forced to close due to the storm.
• Cisco is deploying Mobile Communication Kits, in addition to employee contributions. The briefcase-size kits contain a packaged set of Cisco technologies designed to be easily transportable and provide mobile IP-based wired or wireless data and voice connectivity. The kits allows rapid communications in disaster or remote locations that can be set up within minutes of arrival.
• Intel is coordinating the donation of 1,500 laptops to the American Red Cross for distribution to shelters. In addition, Intel will donate 150 wireless Internet access points to enable wireless local area connectivity in all permanent shelters and is providing fifty Wi-Fi transmitters for installation in the New Orleans downtown and airport area. In locations where SBC can’t get T-1 circuits up, Intel will put in WiMAX equipment. They are also deploying an initial 50 Tropos mesh radios to the airport to aid FEMA efforts, reports Nigel Ballard.
• On August 30th, 2005, federal government officials requested the assistance of GeoWireless to provide mobile voice and data solutions in the Gulf region. In two days, GeoWireless had feet on the street with partners Vivato, WareOnEarth Communications and Agiosat, which brought full DS-3 satellite services and large coverage Wi-Fi wireless access to support Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony and data communications to the federal government s relief and communications efforts.
• Freedom4Wireless, a wireless company based in Lake Mary, FL, has sent a team of its workers in trailer trucks to the hurricane area. They will build “ad hoc wireless networks,” says Keith Money, chief operating officer for the company. F4W licensed Motorola s MeshNetworks Enabled Architecture (MEA) for use in its TWEB and 4GEN Networks.
• Steve Hargadon’s plan is to create numerous Linux-based public kiosks that boot directly into the Firefox browser and display a special home page with links to various services. In addition to offering disaster relief information and news, the kiosks will provide basic email capabilities via Yahoo!, Gmail, Earthlink, MS Hotmail, and other web-mail services.
• Bev Howard put together a PocketPC/mobile formatted web site with information about Hurricane Rita.
• Louis Armstrong International Airport, in New Orleans, is being used for relief airlifts. Much of the aviation communications infrastructure was knocked out, Federal Computer Week observes, but jury-rigged control towers and mobile satellite uplinks let thousands of relief planes land.
• Five Silver Fox “unmanned aerial vehicles,” or UAVs, equipped with thermal imaging technology to detect the body heat of storm survivors, are en route to the crippled city.
• The Arkansas Electric Cooperative is sending Wild Blue satellite Internet dishes to Louisiana, setting up Internet access in computer camps where survivors can contact loved ones.
• With terrestrial networks down, satellite communications is sometimes the only option. Consumer oriented WildBlue has the edge in pricing and modem speeds, although Direcway has announced performance upgrades. WildBlue costs as low as $49.95 a month. It uses Canada’s Anik F2 with 30 Ka-band circular spotbeams licensed to Wildblue Communications. Consumer-oriented 2-way satellite services using the Ku band include Direcway and Starband which start at $59.99 a month and go up.A self-configuring and self-healing mesh network combined with with a portable VSAT satellite terminal creates a more flexible mobile satellite installation. World Communication Center and Strix Systems use an attached mobile VSAT station on a trailer.
• The city of Lafayette, Louisiana has a city-wide wireless cloud, thanks to Syndeo Communications and Tropos. The network covers 13 square miles using Tropos Networks 5110 Wi-fi cells. Syndeo provides 1 Mbps broadband to residents and businesses in Lafayette (see DW: Victory in Lafayette & Battle for Lafayette). The Louisiana legislature passed SB 126 this summer which requires a municipality to conduct a referendum before providing a communications service.
• UpLit, based in New Orleans, and formerly known as Louisiana International Teleport, a division of PetroCom LLC, is now operational.UpLit claims to be the only satellite communications company offering video and telecommunications connectivity in the Gulf South via satellite, fiber and wireless. All systems at the Teleport for both Cellular and VSAT are reported operational with commercial power restored.
• At the Houston Astrodome, Technology For All, a Houston nonprofit, set up 40 desktop computers loaded with Internet connections and office software. SBC said it planned to establish a communications center at the Astrodome with about 1,000 telephone lines and free high-speed Internet service. A similar setup is in the works at a shelter in San Antonio, Texas, where the company is based.
• Earthlink, based in Atlanta, launched a Web page for people to submit their own names and location, and search the submissions of others.
• Katrina Amateur High Frequency (shortwave) and live radio from WWL (now a joint broadcast of Entercom and ClearChannel) are available.

• “I hold her hand as tight as I could. And she told me, you can’t hold me. She said take care of the kids and the grandkids.” - New Orleans survivor, Hardy Jackson

  Local radio, tv, newspaper and scanning radio links include WDSU, WWL, Times-Picayune, Bourbocam, Alabama newspapers, Louisiana newspapers, Mississippi newspapers, Scanner Database, eHam Radio networks, New Orleans Fire Radio and City Frequencies. The New Orleans Katrina Wiki has additional scanner and IRC information.

• Radio Reference has a Wiki with the Status of Public Service Radio Systems. New Orleans current radio system was designed to support 800 users; there are currently 2500 users. Governor Blanco says they need more 800-MHz trunking repeaters, tower crews, 1000 portable radios, three hundred-foot tower trailers, and additional staff.
• CyberJournalist has compiled a lengthy list of bloggers who’ve been posting from/near/about New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. HurricaneMeetup.com may help deal with the trama.
  
• Glen Pitre was in the midst of making a documentary of what might happen if a hurricane should hit New Orleans. Then Katrina struck. Pitre, who owns a home in New Orleans, borrowed a helicopter from Universal Pictures, which was filming Miami Vice in Florida. Because the helicopter had the fake police logo’s, they were not “shooed” away like the rest of the media. They alternatively rescued people and shot in iMax.
• Cox Communications is the largest cable TV provider in Louisiana with nearly 700,000 customers and serves New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and nearby areas. Nationwide, Cox is the nation s 3rd largest cable provider, with 6.3 million basic-cable customers.
• New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was previously VP of Cox Communications s Louisiana division. He ripped a new hole for state and federal officials:
  

  They don’t have a clue what’s going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras Goddamn — excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed.

• Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson stole a school bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans. The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there. “I just took the bus and drove all the way here…seven hours straight,’ Gibson admitted. “I hadn’t ever drove a bus.” Passenger Albert McClaud said, “It’s better than being in New Orleans, we want to be somewhere where we’re safe.”
• Portland-based Mercy Corps and NW Medical Teams had a truck packed with medical supplies, ready to roll on the same day the Hurricane hit. They were prevented from leaving by FEMA, who said they feared a traffic jam in New Orleans. It had to sit for four days. FEMA funnels donations to conservative religious organizations, although it expanded its political scope for the hurricane.FEMA is a disaster.
  
• Scipionus.com (above), launched Wednesday, is a “wiki” page/Google Map of the Gulf Coast. All of the information on the map has been provided by ordinary citizens, most of whom presumably have come to the site in search of information on the flood themselves. Greg Stoll explains how to make your own map. Individuals can Geotag Photos to enable Geo Photoblogging for integrating Google Maps with Flickr photos.
• Kathryn Cramer explains how to make GoogleMaps using GoogleEarth. It’s the best way to check if a New Orleans address is under water.
• Sascha Meinrath says he is working with Part 15 and expects to go to the region on September 6th, using technology developed at the Champaign-Urbana Wireless Network (CUWiN). They haven’t been authorized by FEMA yet.
• Glenn Fleishman of WiFiNetNews asks people to leave a comment if they know of any available WiFi hotspots for reporters and regular citizens. Links to stories that list this information are welcome as well. You’re welcome to leave any helpful comments on this page, too, of course.
  
• E-Week has a special report: IT in the Breach with more than a dozen stories.

The collapsed bridge that once crossed Lake Pontchartrain, one of the main roadways into New Orleans, also held the fiber-optic cables that transported calls and Internet traffic to and from the city.

Katrina will be the costliest natural disaster in United States history. According to Reuters, an estimated minimum of 2.3 million homes and businesses were without power in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

The Wireless Emergency Response Team was established on the night of September 11, 2001 and is a function of the National Communications System (NCS) in Washington D.C. The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams provide contact information.

The Feds prefer $5,000, interoperable Project 25 radios with FIPS140-2 security so Al-Qaeda can’t listen in. Project SAFECOM, is working on interoperable communications between first-responder agencies. Of course not everyone has them or can afford them.

Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff (left) said government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. The Times-Picayune did, of course. CNN says government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

The Northern Command is leading the military effort. Its mission is homeland defense and civil support. Here’s a Transcript of Adm. Timothy J. Keating, Commander.

The National Instructional Fixed System (ITFS), uses the 2.5 GHz band and links schools with broadband wireless. Their members might be less restricted by bureaucratic overhead. Broadband wireless backbones, like those available from Towerstream, XO and others might be used to link them.

Battery operated wireless-mesh routers (right) are capable of instantly establishing networks. Flarion or WiMax towers can feed mobile units or remote hotspots like Netgear’s mobile hotspots (below) that integrate a Flarion wireless backhaul with a WiFi hotspot. That might provide emergency shelters with voice, data and video. Netgear joined the WiMax Forum this week. Cellular service may take months to restore.

Meanwhile, Zyxel’s “Prestige 200W” SIP-compatible voice over WiFi phone costs about $250 with 128-bit WEP encryption. Y-Tel is planning a $99 model. Laptops and handhelds like Nokia’s $350 WiFi Tablet and Dell’s $350 PocketPCs could prove invaluable to emergency workers and the public. Right now.

If Clearwire and Intel wanted to showcase WiMax, they’ve got no better stage. Same deal with Chuck and Paul.

ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and USA Today have the latest. Yahoo Full Coverage, DeadlyKatrina.com and StormDigest round up the stories. Craig’s List has heartwrenching posts. Directions Magazine has a roundup of GIS related Katrina news.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 1:47 am.