The Post-Katrina landscape has been turned into wireless lab, says MSNBC, which reviews some of the technologies used by grass roots groups in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Rita.
Mac Dearman visited shelters in northern Louisiana to connect telephones. Dearman doesn’t work for a phone company. He owns a local wireless Internet service provider, and the gear he set up doesn’t need a traditional phone network. It carries calls as well e-mail and other data over the Internet Dearman was not alone. Teams from large companies, private groups and the military converged on the Gulf Coast in ad hoc fashion to set up wireless networks, all the while battling bureaucracies that didn’t seem to understand the agility and flexibility of the technologies being marshaled.
The spontaneous wireless projects by groups that simply wanted to help government mandate or not is spurring interest in how to deploy the latest in communications technology and expertise in a more organized fashion after future disasters.
Sascha Meinrath, an Illinois-based community wireless project leader who worked with Dearman, said he participated in the FCC’s Sept. 2 meeting but his group never got calls back from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His team headed into the devastated area anyway, and started setting up equipment.
“In the first couple weeks, we were often days if not a week more ahead of the next wave of support for the evacuees and for people on the ground,” he said.
Meinrath’s project has lit up two dozen evacuee centers with Internet as well as a medical clinic in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. A month after the disaster, teams are training local groups.
Malik Rahim, co-founder of a the Common Ground clinic in Algiers, praised the efforts and the pace at which the technology was deployed. “Within a matter of hours, not days, we had functioning communications established,” he said.
Datastorm dealers including Vancouver-based Mike Veja and Ground Control sent 2-way satellite trailers to the area.
Satellite phone dealers, handling GlobalStar and Iridium, getting ready for the busy hunting season, ran low on inventory but didn’t complain (much) when their factory orders got re-routed and pressed into service in the Gulf Coast. Orbit One Communications said it has delivered 10,000 satellite transmitters to manage and track assets for federal, state and private agencies in the Gulf Coast region.
Intel is coordinating the donation of 1,500 laptops to the American Red Cross for distribution to shelters. In addition, Intel donated 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. Additional computer/communications resources were added subsequently. Ballard told DailyWireless editor Sam Churchill that the FCC gave Intel conditional permits to use 3.6Ghz WiMax within four hours.
Sascha Meinrath is working with Part 15, using technology developed at the Champaign-Urbana Wireless Network (CUWiN).
Here are some of his thoughts on the lessons the Katrina/Rita:
- 5-9s infrastructure (i.e., networks that are fully operational 99.999% of the time) is a myth.
- Volunteers working on shoe-string budgets and donated equipment can, under the right circumstances (especially in chaotic situations), be far more effective than “official responders.”
- Top-down organizing is often far less efficient than distributed (flat) hierarchies for some facets of disaster response.
- Ad-hoc (wireless) networks were often the first telecommunications infrastructure made available to evacuees, beating out the major providers by days (and often weeks).
- Had a diverse array of telecommunications infrastructures been in place, the cataclysmic failure may have been avoided. In addition, networks that are set up to “phone home” to central locations/servers are prone to failure when most needed.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Katrina Telecom, Ham Radio, WiMax: Trial By Fire, FEMA = Death, Live From New Orleans, 700 MHz On The Line, News Maps, Solar Electric to Go, FCC Talks Katrina, Pronto Net, Georgia COWs, COWs & COLTs.
