Talking Through Disasters: The Federal Role in Emergency Communications
From
September 11, 2001, to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Congress and the Bush
Administration have wrestled with the challenge of improving emergency
management communications. An unprecedented federal spending spree has
yielded scant progress, however, and Washington’s programs should be
scrapped. It is unlikely that they will ever be able to achieve, either
efficiently or effectively, the goal of creating the kind of emergency
communication systems the nation needs to respond to national disasters.
The
right approach would include adhering to a set of policies that promote
effective public–private sharing of the emergency management
electromagnetic spectrum, create a national capability to deploy a
wide-area emergency management communications network for catastrophic
disasters, and establish coherent national leadership for emergency
response communications. |
