¶ … natural disaster, such as a tornado, the responsibility for communicating with and caring for the population falls on elected officials and civic leaders. Having an emergency communications network in place is essential.
Communications services provides an emergency communications reserve based on a variety of volunteer skills, including administrative, technical and operational, for emergency tactical, administrative and logistical communications between the city, its agencies, and county government.
With the report of tornado damage in the neighboring town and a current tornado warning having been issued it is not unexpected that some or all of the communication infrastructure in the disaster related areas would be disabled or even destroyed. The main function of emergency communications is to set up communication networks so that survivors can establish a contact or can be located by the rescue teams through common electronic devices such as cellular phones.
In the case that some cellular networks are working, those base stations can be utilized but transmissions must be modified (different band frequency, more power, etc.) for emergency communications to cover larger areas. In addition, local police stations may be equipped with a radio base station that can also be used to set up the emergency network. For emergency communications, the mobile phone units must be able to operate in the emergency mode with a compatible transmission frequency.
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This assistance should have been pre-arranged. For this plan to be viable, a regular mobile phone needs to be able to communicate with a satellite. The modifications of existing systems may include having high power emergency channels available in the satellite, add-on extendable antennas for the mobile phone, and hardware/software reconfiguration in the mobile units.
Simultaneously a small subset of local users, e.g. police and rescue officers, would carry mobile phones that are satellite capable. These phones would be modified so they can communicate with satellite capable phones, forming an ad-hoc network if disaster strikes and all base stations are destroyed.
There is a necessity for mobile command systems that are designed for an interoperable environment. Local and federal governments have recognized the importance of mobile emergency response networks that can rapidly establish reliable communication links to support multimedia broadband applications (Hinton, Klein, & Haner, 2005). These mobile command units will be relied on for portable-to-mobile connectivity until the infrastructure can be brought back up.
Having a pre-developed action plan is also important, as is regional consensus regarding frequencies, equipment, contacts and resources, in order to ensure a successful communication-restoration operation (Roberts, 2007). These command centers should consist of…
