A Few More Katrina Lessons

To ensure that we, as first responders, are able to continue to save lives and keep America safe, we need to clear the spectrum for emergency response ? now.

We need our public safety workers to be able to have interoperable communications, the ability of agencies to speak quickly to each other in emergencies. This could mean that a child, separated from her parents during a hurricane, is returned unharmed, or that multiple agencies coordinating relief supplies can deliver services quickly and efficiently.

Clearing the spectrum will provide the first-responder community with the ability to enhance operations and upgrade capabilities, including high-speed data transfers, wireless video transmissions and Intranet access in vehicles.

We need Congress to set a firm date to complete the transition to digital TV and free the spectrum for public safety as close to Dec. 31, 2006, as possible.

The lives of first responders and the citizens we serve remain at risk under current conditions.

Yeah, so no big deal ... just more lives on the line, right? This has been a lesson that we took very quickly from 9/11 and have promptly sat on our hands with for the past 4 years. There are bills in the hopper to move this problem from the To Do list to the Done pile. John McCain, not surprisingly, has one such bill to incentivize and speed up the process of clearing up the radio spectrum for this. But since it involves spending money, that doesn't fit within the governing majority's ways, it seems. So we sit idley by as more lives are put at risk with each passing day.

As journalist Laurie Garrett recently wrote, ?If government cannot inform, there is no government.?

After 9-11, I worked with other volunteers downtown in helping rebuild damaged communications networks and restore service to schools and other community centers. I saw firsthand how important this was to rebuilding shattered communities and helping people pull their lives back together.

That experience led me to envision a National Tech Corps, a ready reserve like our national guard, only made up of communications and computer specialists, along with a stockpile of hardware that would be ready to go in the event of a disaster. I took that idea to Senator Ron Wyden, a friend of mine who was then head of the Science and Technology Committee, and together we got it passed by the Senate 97 to 0.

This idea was incorporated into the federal Homeland Security Act. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security has completely failed to implement it.

As a result, last week the FCC was struggling to pull together an ad-hoc consortium of communications companies and Internet service providers to quickly pool their resources. Had the National Tech Corps been up and running, we would have already had stockpiles of essential gear at the ready, along with trained specialists who had practiced emergency response.

Now, the National Tech Corps must be fully funded and implemented before the next disaster strikes.

But something very encouraging is also happening, as we speak, that we also ought to learn from. The Internet, and people?s ability to access it to both get and give information, has opened a multi-dimensional form of participation in emergency response that goes way beyond the online fundraising we have become familiar with.

As Wired News points out, ?websites have become hubs for putting badly needed goods and services directly into the hands of people who need them most. Where organizations like the Red Cross discourage anything other than financial donations, sites like Craigslist allow people to meet up with victims for face-to-face aid.?

Survivors of the disaster are also using the net to share critical information with each other. For example, on one site, people have created a detailed map of New Orleans with real-time reports on which roads are passable or not.

All of that is essentially fleshing out the concept that "information is power." One of the fascinating things that we've seen on the tech/communication side of this event is that the old media outlets have seen the benefits of faster turnaround that eminates from blogs and message boards. The Houston Chronicle has been doing yeoman's work covering the story in their own back yards (a welcome change from years past). They've used their growing acceptance of blogs to speed up the news cycle in covering Katrina. And while the message board has the unnerving ability to generate about 100 posts a week on "Why isn't Joel Osteen ripping apart his church to house evacuees?" there's still a net positive to the information generated from the masses.

And outside of the MSM boundaries, there are loads of excellent resources sprouting up to focus on recovery efforts. Still, none of this negates the need for some form of central organization (ie - the role of government in this case). Instead, government should learn from the best examples out there and incorporate them. New ideas will outstrip them, but the wealth of added knowledge and accumulated wisdom leave us better prepared at our biggest hub of interaction. The still-mighty vines of entreprenuerial innovation should always be there to help us press forward, but one does not negate the other - they go hand in hand, especially in moments such as this.

• Breakdowns Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy ... what I take from this is the quickness in which state and local resources are overwhelmed. By way of comparison, I also recall the chaos and confusion that even Harris County officials saw as we began to bring evacuees into Texas. Harris County Judge Robert Eckels had to go so far as to alert the local news stations that he would be arriving at the Astrodome around midnight to clear up some of the conflicting, contradictory, and confusing reports we got in the early moments of the Astrodome migration. That's bad enough ... and we didn't have to deal with the weather-related damage. I think there's ultimately a good deal of fault to be heaped on Mayor Nagin's and Governor Blanco's shoulders for the degree to which they knew how to prepare for a situation such as this. But when you have a Governor calling up the President to ask for "everything you've got" and the immediate effect is that you get, essentially, nothing ... then that share of the blame burden goes right up the food chain to the White House.
  
• Put to Katrina's Test - a bit of a line-item rundown on Katrina from the LA Times. A bit thin on the local and state problems.
  
• The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos ... an excellent timeline view of New Orleans. On the local and state front, this stood out as another minor ding in Nagin's response:
  

  In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

  So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

  I know it's only 200 - far fewer than the busses sitting idle at the bus barn could have evacuated. But knowing that the offer was made and declined still rings as a hollow endorsment of leadership when confronted with "the real deal."
  

All of the criticism stated, I should point out, is not for the sake of any political point scoring. This post-Katrina disaster we've witnessed is not the failure of a particular ideology, so to speak. Nor is it, as some suggest, the failure of government in the abstract. It is the very specific failure of leadership on the part of individuals.

The best point of comparison I can think of, and I'll take my lumps for the ineffectiveness of it, is that of the offensive defenseman in hockey. It's a position that requires a lot of risk to be taken. Defensemen, generally, aren't major puckhandlers in the sport. But since the time of Bobby Orr, teams have witnessed how lethal a puckhandling defenseman can be. They take chances by leaving their defensive post to rush the net. My own way of describing the position is that if such a player succeeds on 51% of the risks they take, they're a genius. If they succeed on 49% of the risks they take, they're the goat of the team. What we saw with Katrina was 3 such players performing at well under 49%. But, like it or not, they're the players you're stuck with this season. Progress is not made solely by carping on the 50+% failure rate, but hoping that adequate lessons get taken from those failures so that two things happen: the current situation gets alleviated to the best degree possible from this point out ... and that the next time we have to endure a catastrophe such as this, we don't screw it up anywhere near as badly.