Managing Public Disasters (Part 2 of 2)

 

 

On 9/11, the principal first responders were from the Fire Department of New York, the New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) and the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management (OEM). The response was immediate.

Most Port Authority police commands used ultra-high-frequency radios. Although all the radios were capable of using more than one channel, most PAPD officers used just one local channel. The local channels were low-wattage and worked only in the immediate vicinity of that command. The PAPD also had an agency-wide channel, but unfortunately, not all commands could access it.

On that tragic day, the Port Authority did not have standard operating procedures covering how multiple commands would respond to a disaster at the WTC. The different commands did not know how to communicate with each other via radio during the incident. The result was chaos. Incompatible radios and overcrowded frequencies plagued rescue crews. Firefighters, police and emergency workers could not talk to each other. Some survivors insisted that communications screw-ups were responsible for increasing the death toll on 9/11. The general consensus was that better communications technology should have been in place for first responders.

Informing the public means supervising the media so that it is providing a constant flow of …