Public-safety communications infrastructure has improved greatly since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. But questions persist as to whether the policies and plans currently in place are adequate for another event of that magnitude.

This month marks eight years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the fateful day when the United States learned to fully appreciate its vulnerability to terrorism — and the shortcomings in its emergency communication systems, which were overloaded and glaringly lacking interoperability.

Immediately, the federal government took action, greatly increasing security measures at airports and creating the Department of Homeland Security. New federal grants were established and funded to address the situation, with a good chunk of the money used for emergency communications.

But such preparations proved to be insufficient in 2005, when another catastrophe — attributable to Mother Nature, not terrorists — hit the United States. Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in unprecedented fashion. Katrina forced the first-responder community to re-examine its communications systems, backup alternatives and operating procedures, particularly in regard to those times when even hardened terrestrial networks are incapacitated by disaster.

Thus, at a time when the need for emergency-communications upgrades normally might be waning after 9/11, Katrina's landfall and devastating impact caused elected officials and the first-responder community to refocus on the issue. In addition to continued funding for existing programs, new initiatives were started at the local, state and federal levels.

Their impact has been evidenced on several occasions in smaller-scale incidents, such as the communications success stories emerging from the series of hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004 and the California wildfires and the Minneapolis bridge collapse of 2007.

But a nagging question for first-responder communications officials remains: Is the United States prepared to handle the next mega-scale disaster? While myriad reasons were given to support their beliefs, those interviewed for this article were virtually unanimous in their conclusions.

“I'm convinced that we're in better shape than we were for the last major disaster, but that really means — for the most part — only a little better,” said David Boyd, director of the DHS's Command, Control and Interoperability Division. “There's still a great deal that needs to be done. [To paraphrase] Winston Churchill, we're kind of beginning to approach the end of the beginning.”

Dick Mirgon, president-elect of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), echoed this sentiment.

“We are light years ahead of where we were during that last major crisis of 9/11 and even Katrina,” Mirgon said. “However, we've got light years to go.”

Progress to Date

After 9/11, “interoperability” immediately became the number-one buzzword within the Beltway regarding emergency communication. After all, within a half hour of the airplane hitting the second tower in the World Trade Center, New York Police Department units were ordered to leave the area, because helicopter observers assessed that the buildings would collapse. But as police officers evacuated the World Trade Center, many passed firefighters still entering and climbing the building, who accounted for a large portion of the more 300 firefighters who died during the tragic incident.

Details of those chaotic moments continue to be debated. Some officials say firefighters were given evacuation orders that either were not received or simply were ignored by the selfless individuals focused on making heroic rescue attempts in the towers that were destined to crumble.

What was acknowledged quickly was that the NYPD and the city's fire department did not communicate with each other on that day as well as they should. Today, the working environment in New York City has improved greatly, as evidenced during a May 17 exercise in which a unified command post was established involving disparate first-responder agencies — something that did not occur on Sept. 11, 2001 — in reaction to a mock explosion in a transit tunnel.