Disaster communications: Lessons from 9/11

55,000 came in.

Thousands of law enforcement officers and firefighters were trying to connect by phone, radio, and two-way pager. Devices and networks, not to mention personnel, were overloaded. Police radios were generally working, but the best information was often by word of mouth.

At our office-building clinic, the volunteers resorted to face-to-face communication, sending people to meet up with a group of responders gathering on the nearby Pace University campus and bring back what information they could. The main message rapidly went from bad to worse. It could be summed up as, “There’s nobody coming out of that alive.”

Planning to communicate
While obviously both of us hope nothing like that ever happens again, as emergency responders it’s our job to plan for the unthinkably disastrous. No matter what, responders need to be able to deliver messages to the public, talk to hospitals, and connect with each other.

Since 1999, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, charged with coordinating all aspects of the response, had occupied permanent headquarters in Seven World Trade Center, on Greenwich Street, just north of the landmark twin towers. A vital communications link was the radio repeater system based on the ground floor of One World Trade Center, the north tower. The loss of those facilities – and key personnel working there – significantly hampered the response.

Today, it’s considered a bad idea to put an emergency operations center near places likely to be direct targets or at risk for collateral damage. When building a new emergency-response headquarters, New York City put it across the East River in downtown Brooklyn, far from all potential targets and landmarks in lower Manhattan.

Making the connections
But that distance can be a weakness if communications are reduced, as we were, to sending messengers on foot to have face-to-face conversations to relay information.

Even if radios and phones are working, they’re much less useful if responders can’t talk to each other. In 2001, the Fire Department of New York, the New York Police Department and the Port Authority Police all used different radio systems with different capabilities on different frequencies. Unable to connect with each other, neither the agencies nor the rescuers themselves could efficiently coordinate to help victims. This disconnection may also have prevented the evacuation of responders before the buildings fell.

If leaders are to be farther away and yet still act rapidly in an unfolding situation, they