Maintaining Communications During Emergencies

At this week's homeland security summit, hosted by ESRI, hot topics of discussion we're centered around taking lessons home from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. As most of us know, what made these disasters and the response to them so troublesome was the immediate lack of communication and communication infrastructure. Contingency planning now must take into account how responders can do their jobs if communications are lost. It was interesting to hear one gentleman (from Louisiana) make a comment yesterday stating just that - what do you expect to do when you have no communication channels? Obviously the man felt a little like he and his state we're being ganged up on somewhat as Katrina has become the poster child of how not to respond to a disaster. This are is definitely an important one to address in emergency response. I just stumbled onto an interesting white paper that tackles exactly this topic. See "Planning For The Next One: Maintaining Communications During Emergencies" - Disaster Recovery - How will your communications environment weather the next big storm? It's a free whitepaper from Avaya