Can't Reach Out, Can't Touch
An emergency communications meltdown made things worse. What's the fix?
New Orleans, post-Katrina, has been an emergency communications disaster. Residents couldn't alert rescuers to their whereabouts. Rescue workers couldn't get in touch with headquarters or with each other. Police turned back trucks with repair crews and supplies because no one had been able to authorize their entrance into the ruined city. And Michael Brown of FEMA said he didn't know about the thousands of people being dropped off at the convention center until he saw it on TV. Yet in February 2002, when New Orleans hosted the first post-9/11 Super Bowl, local, state, and federal officials communicated with ease. Patching their radios into a single emergency communications system, they shared up-to-the-minute info on potential threats. Some 73,000 fans came and went without a hitch. So what went wrong in 2005?
Actually, things were going right at first. The network of towers, repeaters, and base stations that make up the city's emergency communications system survived the hurricane and continued to operate until about 2 p.m. on Monday, August 29. That's when strong wind gusts sent a large shard of glass hurtling through the air toward the roof of a downtown skyscraper, home to the generator that powered the city's main emergency communications transmitter. The glass punctured the radiator, causing the generator to shut down.
Plan B. A backup system was available--the rudimentary state police "mutual aid" radio transmitter powered from the Superdome. But heavy demands from hundreds of police, fire, and other emergency workers slowed communication to a crawl. Then the floodwaters forced the evacuation of the city's fire and police dispatch centers. So the already hobbled system lost its traffic control.
Meanwhile, Katrina piled on the misery. The storm kayoed other transmitters, as well as commercial radio towers still used by some nearby parishes for emergency broadcasts. With electricity out citywide, emergency workers could not recharge the batteries in their two-way radios, so these too began to go dark. And while some emergency officials had older-model satellite phones, there weren't nearly enough and the batteries quickly died.
The final straw? State police at a checkpoint stopped technicians sent to repair the damaged radiator on the main emergency communications generator. No one had told them to let the men through. Technicians didn't make it to the site until Thursday and brought the transmitter back online late that night.
The breakdown of emergency communications will be a key topic at hearings planned on Capitol Hill. Disaster response experts hope the Katrina chaos will "serve as a wake-up call," says John Cohen, senior homeland security policy adviser for Massachusetts, adding that "in the first major test of our emergency response capabilities after September 11, we see once again our Achilles heel is the total meltdown of the infrastructure we rely on for communication."
There's a lot of work ahead to avoid future meltdowns:
After two years, the Department of Homeland Security still hasn't completed a detailed assessment of the nation's emergency communications systems and their shortfalls. The current goal is to complete the study this year and release it in '06.
Federal grants for upgrading major emergency radio systems continue to fall well short of the billions needed to provide true nationwide integration.
Because of certain loopholes, TV broadcasters have been able to hold on to the radio frequency earmarked by the government for a nationwide emergency communications grid. Last year, the House defeated a bill that would have forced broadcasters to relinquish the frequency; sponsors reintroduced the bill last week.
It's not that cities, states, and the feds haven't been trying to bring their communications systems up to speed with the tools and frequencies at their disposal. Despite being in one of the poorest states in the country, New Orleans was, for example, one of the first U.S. cities to implement a public safety wireless network. Such upgrades helped, says Dominic Tusa, a communications consultant for the city. But given the devastation and the resources at hand, he says, "I'm not sure many other cities could have done better." And that may be the scariest lesson of all.
With Angie C. Marek
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.