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.