Communications Threats Unprecedented, Myers Warns
ORLANDO -- Challenges to E-911 call centers and emergency communications are ever more complex, demanding more planning and cooperation, Gen. Richard Myers, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chmn., said Mon. at the annual Assn. of Public Safety Communications Officials conference. Chmn. from after Sept. 11, 2001, through Katrina, retiring late in 2005, Myers said those two events showed many lessons remain to be learned.
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“What we face today is almost unprecedented,” Myers said: “Whether it’s natural disasters like Katrina or some flu pandemic. I don’t see it getting better, frankly. The challenges you're going to face in what you do will just get harder and bigger over time.” Myers added: “Our ability to respond is going to require interoperability that I don’t think we've ever seen before.”
Better planning, is key, he said, noting that disaster preparedness plans are often years out of date.
Table top exercises showing how agencies handle disasters have utility for finding potential communication breakdowns and other problems, Myers said. Katrina shows that advance govt. exercises didn’t ask all the right questions, he said.
“The Dept. of Defense was mentioned in the national response plan, but there were no specifics given, none,” he said: “The national exercises in disaster response never took it to the point where somebody had to turn to the Dept. of Defense and say now we have to turn to you for whatever. We never got to the hard part. We never worst-cased it. We always got to the part where state and local officials handled things fine and the exercise ends.”
Katrina showed the importance of cooperation, Myers said: “We'd better know what we expect from the person on the left and the person on the right. The agency on the left and the agency on the right.” Communications interoperability depends in large part on understanding of how federal and state agencies collaborate in crisis, he said.
“If we've got to be interoperable, if we've got to be able to talk,” Myers said: “Before you start laying wire or putting up antennas or issuing radios, before you get too far down the road into the technology, you'd better understand the concept of operations that’s going to apply to whatever you're doing.”
The public gave the govt. a “bye” in part during Katrina, but that won’t happen if another disaster brings a similar meltdown, Myers said: “The public doesn’t expect us to be perfect. The next time, we're not going to get a pass. We're going to be expected to have learned some of those lessons that we were supposed to have learned in Katrina.”