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First Responder Networks 5 Years After 9/11
stinkymountain writes, "Five years after 9/11, you'd think all of the nation's first responders would be on a state-of-the-art wireless network that would enable police, fire and other emergency personnel to talk to each other in case of a disaster. But they're not -- yet. Network World ran an investigative piece sketching why progress has been so slow, and describing the progress that has been made." The article leads off with a scenario that represents the toughest possible test for a first-responder network. Even the best imaginable networked system might bog down in the midst of "fog of war" situations.
Reading about how the radios could not communicate inside of certain buildings I wonder if it might make sense to include an "emergency" channel in wireless networking equipment. After all, many warehouses have wireless access points setup for their mobile inventory devices.
This 802.11 emergency channel that could be activated and used by emergency personell equipped with special radios - kind of a "skype-911".
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A local Fire/Police organization was recently trying to upgrade their radios to a newer system. The project failed spectacularly with huge cost overruns and was eventually cancelled. Their solution? Award a virtually identical contract to the same vendor for the same system. The problem is government...wasteful spending brought on by too many years of overfunding. Where a $5 solution would suffice, they ALWAYS spend $500. The solution? I dunno, anarchy maybe.
The department, and the concept. Unfortunately, it was just a tool for the government to pretend to do something about the problem - the illusion of safety, if you will. For all the whining Americans do about having to pay taxes, you'd think they'd demand that the department do its fucking job.
The American public is just too distracted to care.
That's completely unfounded bullshit. I assume you come to this conclusion in one of the common ways: the government doesn't tell you of the millions of phone calls, emails, and letters they get from citizens and organizations who care, so you assume they don't get many; Bill O'Reilly and others broadcast that the public is in uproar over "the war against Christmas" and never mention what the public is actually thinking since they don't know.
The fact is only 2 things tell us what the general public is thinking: polls and votes. The largely inaccurate polls might tell us the president's approval rating is low, but tell us nothing of what the people actually want done. Voter turnout tells us that people think the candidates are too similar to make a vote matter, or there is no one running who they are interested in. If there were candidates who really stood out, were well spoken, and spoke to the heart of what most of the public is actually thinking there would be huge turnout and all of a suddon you'd think people really cared. It's a lack of options, not a lack of caring.
Developers: We can use your help.
Yes indeed !
,with 1 shared mutual aid channel for others so tey can collaborate
I'll give you an Insightful on that.
Had they had multiple repeaters the story would have been better
Perhaps a trunked radio system, with many distributed receive sites for the handhelds.and multiple transmit sites
Sparingly shared by ONLY police and fire
A Ray Nagin fan, eh? I'll tell you why work on the WTC plaza is so slow:
1. There was a lot of debris. I don't think anyone who hasn't seen the towers can possibly understand the enormity of these buildings. It simply doesn't register unless you've stood at the base and looked up. People think "yeah, yeah, a couple of big buildings, I get it." while picturing a large building they may have seen and thinking "it's a little bigger than that." Wrong... it's like 10 times bigger than that. My wife's never been to NYC, I showed her a picture of the towers and pointed at one of the tiny buildings next to it and said "see that little building? That's bigger than any building I've ever seen in Belo Horizonte [where she's from]" and that building was less than a quarter the height and probably much less than a quarter the footprint.
2. The debris was very hazzardous, including a lot of fun things like asbestos. Remember, there was smoke rising for months after the collapse.
3. The streets in NYC are not big enough for effective hauling of that much debris, and only so many trucks and people can be at the site. Include the fact that roads around the site were open, it makes it very difficult to effectively remove all that debris.
4. They don't want to "fill" it, they want to build a new building there.
5. Ray Nagin's an $%*#@(!. (Hey, everybody's entitled to an opinion, right?)
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Hey, Marc. Let's continue with the 9/11 example for a moment. Actually it is MORE efficient to have the communications separate in this type of situation. Much of law-enforcement traffic uses 10- codes. However, the rest of the communication is generally verbose and free-form by fire standards. Fire communication is generally very structured and tight by police standards. Where police communications tend to be more descriptive, fire communications tend to be more generic. (And if you really want to go to the extreme, you should listen to air traffic control frequencies). Even "mayday" calls are dramatically different between police and fire. There are very important reasons for these differences.
That is where NIMS and Unified Command comes into play. These programs and concepts provide an excellent framework for helping resolve the issues. They are handled at a high level, and the actual information and commands move up and down the chain as necessary. The interaction and translation happens off-line, so that the most limited resources at a major incident (namely radio bandwidth and a person's ability to monitor multiple conversations at once) are not compromised by the goal of getting a guy with a sledgehammer and a guy with an MP-5 to somehow mind meld.
In big incidents things are going to break down. Cops shouldn't be doing technical rescue. Firefighters shouldn't be doing crowd control. K9 SAR shouldn't be using their animals to threaten looters. Unfortunately at big incidents lines get blurred due to the immediate need. You can't fix that by jamming more people on the radio.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
Take a look at AirWave O2, which is the service used by police in the UK. Not only is each handset on a common channel, but they can also be individually dialled, and as a result put into groups. It's not WiFi, but it works.
Ambulance services are starting to hook into AirWave as well, and from what I've seen when working as a volunteer medic at live events (100,000+ people) the difference between talking to your local team, talking to the site team and talking to police on the site team is as simple as hitting a button.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
That's completely unfounded bullshit.
Voter turnout tells us that people think the candidates are too similar to make a vote matter,
You are assuming this, but if people really cared they would pay attention and we wouldn't have candidates that are 'too similar'. I could get into how both parties rigged the presidential debates so no third party candidate could get in after Perot scared the crap out of them in 92 (19% in a 3 way race is a good showing).
If people really wanted a four way debate badly enough, they could pressure the political parties or television networks into doing so.
People DON'T care, that is my experence. 2004 had the largest turnout of any presidential election, coming off the 2000 elections and 9/11 which should have driven interest to an all time high. So what was the turnout like? About 122 of 300 million came out to vote which isn't even half. To me, that shows disinterest.
As for candidates being too similar, compare Gore and Bush to Nader and Bucahnan in 2000. Do you really think they were all that similar?
a fun way of putting the requirements for the radios is:
You should be able to run over the radio with your squad car have it skid into a pond and have a K-9 unit fish it out of said pond drop it into a firepit
and survive multiple times
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