DHS to push for seamless emergency communication in top 75 U.S. cities
A DHS survey released this week gives low grades to most U.S. urban centers for emergency communication; DHS says it aims to achieve major imporvements in emergency interoprability by 2009
DHS secretary Michael Chertoff said that the top seventy-five metropolitan areas in the United States would have modern disaster communications systems in place by 2009. A recent DHS report said that there is still some way to go before this goal is acheived. Chertoff’s plan calls for scrapping old radios and ancient bureaucratic grudges which continue to hobble communications during crises, even five years after the attacks of 9/11.
A DHS survey released on the same day Chertoff’s plan was unveiled gave the highest grades for emergency communications to only six of seventy-five cities and regions studied. Analysts questioned the ability of DHS to realize Chertoff’s pledge. Richard Rotanz, an adviser at Adelphi University and former emergency response official in Nassau County, New York, said the report was unclear about what standards the government planned to reach. “They should have broken it all down more so you can understand where they are weak and strong,” Rotanz said. “Instead, what you get is a very vague description of where things are and where they want to go.”
The survey, by the way, found that while emergency agencies in more than 60 percent of the communities studied had the ability to talk to each other during a crisis, only 21 percent overall showed “the seamless use” of equipment needed to also communicate with state and federal officials.
-read more in this AP report; and see DHS emergency communication survey
