More than a year after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Americans are still wondering how prepared the nation is for the next "big one." They have reason to be concerned. A recent assessment by the Department of Homeland Security indicates that 27% of the states and 10% of the cities evaluated were not prepared to handle a "catastrophic event" of any kind. And while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) now believes this hurricane season will not be as severe as they once predicted, the agency still can't specify with any real certainty when and were the next tropical storm or hurricane will strike.
"Science has not evolved enough to accurately predict on seasonal timescales when and where these storms will likely make landfall," says Gerry Bell, NOAA's lead seasonal hurricane forecaster. "Exactly when and where landfall occurs is strongly controlled by the weather patterns in place as the storms approach land. These weather patterns generally cannot be predicted more than several days in advance."
Can technology help? It already has. But so far most predictions—or warnings—of natural disasters have come out of the constant tweaking of computer models developed by supercomputers, weather-specific satellites, and radar.
A DIRE NEED
The need for innovation is obvious. Hurricane Katrina taught the U.S. a lot of hard lessons. When the storm hit the Gulf in August 2005, the region's emergency communications infrastructure had difficulties coping with the demand. What's more, the various groups of first responders, who already had the monumental challenge of evacuating a city that even in the face of the storm was ill-prepared to do so, were unable to communicate with each other. The cause? Radios that weren't interoperable.
Washington Technology, a bimonthly magazine for IT system integrators and resellers, highlighted the problem in its coverage of the first anniversary of the tragedy. "The preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina show we are still an analog government in a digital age," said the final report of the congressional Select Bipartisan Committee on Preparations for and Response to Hurricane Katrina. "We must recognize that we are woefully incapable of storing, moving and accessing information— especially in times of crisis."
Communications interoperability is another huge issue. When local government officials from across the country met at the United States Conference of Mayors this past June, it was revealed that municipal public safety agencies in 80% of the cities in the U.S. use equipment that is not interoperable. Most of these systems operate on different frequencies, and currently there are no public safety radios that operate on more than one public safety frequency band.
In most areas, public safety communications require users to link incompatible radios by plugging them into a switch/programmable interconnect device. If responders with VHF radios arrive at an incident in which the radio system in use is an 800-MHz system, for instance, a VHF radio and the 800-MHz radio would be plugged into the switch. When a responder with a VHF radio talks, the VHF radio connected to the switch would output the audio through the switch, and the 800-MHz radio would rebroadcast the same audio.
ACHIEVING INTEROPERABILITY
Perhaps the most promising solution to the interoperability problem is SDR, or software-defined radio, which can update and change modulation schemes, protocol standards, and frequency bands (see "SDR Tuning Up To Provide Disaster Relief," p. 43).
The SDR Forum's "Report on SDR Technology for Public Safety" calls for SDR-based multiband radios, which would enable first responders to have a single radio that could be configured to operate on radio systems regardless of band. That by itself won't solve the interoperability problem, but the SDR trade group says it would provide capabilities that would address many situations in which responders to emergencies have incompatible radio systems.
Another major step, the SDR Forum believes, would be the ability to license the protocols of proprietary systems so the responders could have radios that operate independently of frequency band and vendor protocols. Market researcher Venture Development Corp. (VDC) suggests that local, regional, and state first responders may be leading the way in deploying SDR.
VDC recently collected detailed Web survey responses from more than 300 U.S. first-responder units (Fig. 1). Its finding revealed that SDR is currently considered a critical part of their nextgeneration communications infrastructure—despite the fact that the typical pipeline for this type of technology is the Pentagon. But interoperability is only part of the issue.
"Though there are interoperability channels right now in most public safety frequency allocations, those channels, and all others, become useless where the communications infrastructure of public safety facilities becomes inoperative," says Harold Kramer, chief operating officer of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), a national association for amateur radio operators that has been in existence for over 90 years.
"Hardening" of public safety facilities is called for, Kramer says, but the ARRL sees an increasing role for decentralized portable amateur radio stations that aren't infrastructuredependent in providing interoperability communications on-site (see "Hams To The Rescue" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 13650).
Immediately at the onset of Katrina, about a thousand Federal Communications Commission-licensed amateur radio operators began providing continuous high-frequency (HF), VHF, and UHF communications for state, local, and federal emergency workers in and around Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama while agencies like local fire, EMS, and disaster management teams struggled to communicate at all.
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