dailywireless.org » Katrina: 1 Year After

Katrina: 1 Year After

One year ago (archive.org), on Aug. 27, 2005, Hurricane Katrina became a major hurricane, with 115 mph winds elevating it to Category 3 status. By 10 a.m. Central Daylight Time, a hurricane watch had been issued for New Orleans and surrounding areas. By 10 p.m. CDT, a hurricane warning had been issued for the north central Gulf Coast, including the city of New Orleans.

The storm killed 1,460 and caused $40.6 billion in damage to property in southern Louisiana alone.

One year later, Democrats and Republicans are sparing over Katrina Communications. FEMA Director David Paulison said yesterday that the most important post-Katrina communications problem was the inability of first responders to share information, and he asserted the problem has since been fixed.

“The big issue was working, making sure, having discipline, to have a unified command system set up where we’re all planning together, we’re sharing information together,” Paulison said on Face the Nation. ”And we’ve been working on that for the last several months to fix that. And we have done that,” Paulison added.

However, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee accused President Bush’s administration of an “unconscionable” lack of progress in improving emergency communications for first responders since the Katrina disaster.

“The fact that Republicans in Washington blocked Democrats’ efforts to ensure that our first responders were given the tools they needed to effectively communicate in an emergency four years after September 11 was inexcusable, but the fact that they are still resisting Democratic efforts to provide those resources today is simply unconscionable,” DNC Communications Director Karen Finney said in a press release.

Others are getting down to business:

About 1,000 of the 7,000 cell sites along the Gulf Coast were knocked out by Katrina, reports USA Today, and cellphones were virtually useless in New Orleans.
CTIA, the Wireless Association told the FCC this month that most outages stemmed from cell towers that lost power or landline phone service. Phone-company wires carry cell calls once they reach the local tower. Cellular networks could be revived more quickly if placed on a priority list that includes hospitals, public safety agencies and water plants. Installation of new radio towers to fill network gaps in rural areas while providing more overlap in overall wireless coverage, boosting odds that emergency workers will find a signal even if some transmitters fail.
BellSouth estimated it will spend between $400 million and $600 million to restore the network damage done by Hurricane Katrina, the company estimated today. That includes both expenses and capital costs, but is just a preliminary estimate, according to the company.
Cox and other Gulf Coast cable operators are still struggling a year after the hurricane, establishing a new kind of normalcy after their businesses were ravaged. Cox New Orleans now has only 187,500 cable subscribers, versus about 270,000 before the hurricane. Cox’s future there, in good part, is tied to whether or not the Big Easy’s decimated population returns to pre-storm levels. Cox has promised to spend $550 million over the next five years to restore and upgrade its plant in New Orleans.
Louisiana’s state troopers now have more than a dozen ACU-1000 bridging systems from Raytheon, said Lt. Lawrence McLeary, public affairs supervisor for the Louisiana State Police. State and federal agencies have been outfitting trucks with a combination of bridging, satellite and power-generation equipment so they can be moved around and transmit from areas where there are network or electrical outages. The National Guard, for example, recently awarded EFJ Inc. a $12 million order for 25 such systems.

In all, $2.8 million from the State Police budget and about $5 million of the $8.6 million in federal homeland security funds awarded to Louisiana since Katrina and Rita have gone to communications projects, according to the Louisiana State Police.
The military effort, known as Joint Task Force Katrina, brought in more than 350 helicopters, 20 ships, thousands of vehicles, and 71,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it “the greatest disaster-recovery effort in America’s history.”
According to an AT&T, about 28% of companies have no disaster plan in place and almost half admitted they don’t take protective measures when local or federal governments issue warnings of impending disaster such as severe weather.

AT&T’s Network Disaster Recovery unit is said to be unique in the industry, because of the resources it devotes to preparing on a national scale for almost any type of disaster, manmade or natural. The company houses the 150 trailers and other vehicles as well as another 250 trailers that provide backup and logistical support in four undisclosed locations around the country, ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice, as they did in the fall for 2005 for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Photographer Jennifer Warren, shot inside FEMA’s trailer parks. A collection of audio interviews and slideshows, gives a voice to displaced New Orleanians and present FEMA residents. “One year later, thousands of New Orleans’ residents are displaced around the country and around Louisiana,” Warren says. “Still with nowhere to call home, Louisiana residents have little access to job training and placement, and feel a great deal of separation from family members and hopelessness for how to rebuild their lives. Here’s a Flickr set from the 9th Ward.
Ohio’s MARCS (Multi-Agency Radio Communications System) is designed to provide instant voice and data communications statewide. The statewide public safety and emergency management system is shared by several state agencies and provides mobile voice and data, vehicle location and computer-aided dispatching.
Greg Meffert CTO of the City of New Orleans talks about communication after Hurricane Katrina (video clip, right). He discusses WiFi mesh networking and how it serves public service users and the public in New Orleans
Skype does VoIP from PocketPCs, Photobucket provides free video and photo sharing and ShoZu uploads Flickr photos from cell phones and PocketPCs.
Sahana is a free, Open Source Disaster Management system that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers and tracking camp status.

W. David Stephenson, who blogs on homeland security, says homeland security is everyone’s business. He has come up with what is surely golden advice; Ten 21st Century Disaster Preparation Tips the Officials Won’t Tell You:

You won’t find these tips about how to capitalize on those devices and applications on Ready.gov, or other federal, state, and/or local preparedness sites. In some cases it’s because the services described below are private sector ones that government agencies can’t endorse. More likely, most government agencies are clueless that these services exist (for example, it wasn’t until I told them about DCERN that DHS officials realized it existed, even though it operates literally in their own backyard).
So here are ten 21st century disaster and preparedness tips from Stephenson Strategies that you won’t see on the official lists of things to do to prepare for a disaster or terrorist attack, but that you and your neighbors should implement NOW, so that you’ll be prepared to act intelligently and calmly if you find yourselves on your own:

now that thumb drives cost less than $10 ($7.95 at Staples this week), put your family’s medical records (if you can get them from your physician in digital form) and other vital documents on them and attach it to your keychain so you’ll have them with you at all times (encrypt them with TrueCrypt for safety).

buy a pair of family-radio (FRS) walkie-talkies (under $20 at discount stores) for emergency communications. Use them to set up a volunteer, self-organizing community emergency communications network similar to the DCERN one in Washington DC

add your FRS emergency network to National SOS radio, which links local FRS networkswith ham operators for a comprehensive, low-power emergency communications network.

subscribe to the XML feeds from the National Hurricane Center so you’ll get real-time information on hurricanes.

buy a solar charger for your laptop so that you’ll have a portable electric supply with you at all times.

download the free CUWin mesh network software and burn it to CDs to share with your neighbors, so you can create a self-organizing, self-healing mesh network with neighbors even if your Internet access is lost in an emergency.

if Sirius (NYC, Ch. 148; Boston/Philly, 149; LA, 150; Chicago/St. Louis, 151; Balt/DC, 152; Atlanta/Miami, 153; Dallas-Ft.Worth/Houston, 154; Detroit,Pittsburgh, 155; SF/Seattle, 156; Orlando/Tampa-St. Pete, 158) or XM Satellite Radio (Boston, Ch. 210; NYC, 211; Philly, 212; Baltimore, 213; DC, 214; Pittsburgh, 215; Detroit, 216; Chicago, 217; St. Louis, 218; Minneapolis, 219; Seattle, 220, SF, 221; LA, 222; San Diego, 223; Phoenix, 224; Dallas/Ft. Worth, 225; Houston, 226; Atlanta, 227; Tampa, 228; Orlando, 229; Miami, 230) provide real-time, location-based weather and traffic channels for your area, subscribe. XM has a special emergency channel, 247, that’s activated in an emergency.

Use the structure and information of the KatrinaHelp wiki as the starting point to establish a self-help wiki before the hurricane hits, and add to it as the situation evolves

Get all your family and friends to join Pheeder. In a crisis, you’d only have to send a single phone message to let them know you’re alright (Dodgeball.com can do the same thing via SMS message, but only serves a few cities at this point.

After a disaster, cobble together a Google mashup similar to Garbage Scout, using your cameraphone, to alert authorities to where there are elderly/disabled persons who need extra help.

Polls have shown that not only has government failed to prepare for the next natural disaster, terror attack, or pandemic — we’re to blame as well (and don’t forget that there’s even less chance in the future that you’ll be able to count on government assistance in the first 72 hours.
These self-help actions are practical today, using technology in your hands. Please try them — and tell your friends, ASAP.