Crisis Communications Remain Flawed - Washington Post

Crisis Communications Remain Flawed
(excerpts follow):

Crisis Communications Remain Flawed
Despite Promises to Fix Systems, First Responders Were Still Isolated After Katrina

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A06


The chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, vividly recounted in thousands of pages of documents recently released by Louisiana officials, had an eerie familiarity to members of the Sept. 11 commission, who delivered their final report this week.

"On September 11, people died because police officers couldn't talk to firemen. And Katrina was a reenactment of the same problem," Thomas H. Kean, the commission co-chairman and former New Jersey governor, said in an interview. "It is really hard to believe this has not been fixed."

But four years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Kean and the commission concluded, emergency communications networks in most U.S. cities still cannot sustain a major natural disaster or terrorist strike...

"The New Orleans calamity proved overwhelmingly the government's inability to solve chronic, fundamental problems with communications," said Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for six years in the 1990s. "No one in the government has shown leadership on this issue, and now the results are tragic."

The patchwork quilt of incompatible systems that existed in the Gulf Coast remains the national norm.

During Katrina, virtually every system failed: Internet communications, radio transmissions, cell phones, even backup gear such as satellite phones handed out by federal relief workers after the storm. Even when the equipment worked, officials from different agencies and jurisdictions could not talk with one another. Their radios were simply not compatible.

The inability to communicate across jurisdictions -- known as "interoperability" in industry jargon -- is viewed as a critical weakness in the nation's defense against terrorism and natural disasters.

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