Report Details Katrina Communications Fiasco

As state and local officials on the Gulf Coast scrambled to help panicked residents flee Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29, mobile communications units developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were at Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La. -- outside the disaster area -- and did not make it to the state’s emergency operations center in Baton Rouge until the day after the storm hit.

In addition, according to a bipartisan Senate committee report released Tuesday, most of the U.S. Forest Service’s 5,000 radios -- the largest civilian cache in the United States -- remained unused.

In the eight months since Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, much has been written about how the failure of communications hampered relief and rescue efforts. Several reports, including one by a House select committee that Democratic leaders boycotted and another conducted by the White House, documented a collapse of telephones, computers and radio networks.

The 750-page “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” issued by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after 22 hearings over seven months, added some gripping details to the familiar narrative. The panel’s main recommendations -- which included a call for FEMA to be dismantled and restructured -- were announced last week.

* Officials in charge of evacuating Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans were given oral authorization from the state emergency operations center to use National Guard buses to move patients.

But the Guard insisted on proof of such authorization, and the evacuation teams couldn’t get through to state officials because cellphones weren’t working. So patients were put in the back of pickups, and their wheelchairs and stretchers were loaded into boats pulled behind the trucks.

* In St. Bernard Parish, Larry Ingargiola, director of the local Office of Emergency Preparedness, lost all landline and cellphone communications after the storm made landfall.

He escaped a flooding building by climbing to the roof with his family. From there, he got word of the breached levees from Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries officials who rode by in boats. He was without communications for two days.

* In New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s command center at the Hyatt Regency hotel lost all communications, forcing the mayor to transmit information to his emergency managers by walking to City Hall.

Five days after landfall, the White House provided the mayor with a cellphone, but he had to lean out the windows of the storm-damaged hotel in hopes of getting a signal.

* Mississippi’s National Guard director “might as well have been a Civil War general for the first two or three days because he could only find out what was going on by sending somebody,” the report says. “He did have helicopters instead of horses,” Gov. Haley Barbour told the committee, “so it was a little faster.”

In addition to the traumas of failed communications, the Senate report echoes earlier accounts of the paucity of communications gear available to local officials in advance of the storm.

St. Bernard’s Parish was using a communications system so old that online auction site EBay was the source for spare parts, according to the report. In nearby Jefferson Parish, the sheriff’s office was using a digital phone system, but the other county agencies were on analog systems, making communications between them impossible.

A proposed $45-million modernization had been deemed “cost-prohibitive” by local officials the previous year, and a patchwork-quilt approach was 18 months from completion when Katrina struck.

State law enforcement officials were likewise frustrated. In each of the last two years, the report says, the Louisiana State Police asked Congress for $105 million to upgrade its communications network. When those efforts failed, the agency explored grant opportunities offered by the Department of Homeland Security, but its applications were turned down.

In the widespread collapse of communications systems after Katrina hit -- more than 3,000 phone lines were knocked out and callers to 911 frequently got a busy signal, if they got through at all -- private companies were often more resourceful than government agencies in overcoming the challenges, the Senate report says.

The Starwood hotel company, “through effective planning and pre-positioning of phones,” helped about 2,100 people -- guests, employees and their families -- in two of its hotels by deploying satellite phones and using batteries to maintain Internet connections.

“Local responders and journalists sometimes relied on Starwood’s communications capabilities since the city’s communications system was largely lost,” the report says.

Mississippi Power Co. relied on an internal system, SouthernLinc Wireless, that had been designed with “considerable redundancy.” Within three days of landfall, it was functioning at nearly 100%. The utility also installed its own microwave capability to 12 remote staging areas.

Though FEMA’s lapses during the Katrina disaster have been well documented, the U.S. Forest Service -- which maintains its radio supply mostly for fighting fires -- has rarely been mentioned, perhaps because its radios have limited range.

“We deployed 2,176 radios to the region and 30 command repeaters to expand their range,” Forest Service spokesman Dan Jiron said Tuesday. “They’re not like cellphones. Because of their limited range and the need to use repeaters, they were probably not needed beyond that.”