Bay Area City Taps Old Technology to Prepare for New Emergencies

Although it is home to much of Silicon Valley’s high-tech ruling class, this rolling, horse-dotted community on the outskirts of Palo Alto decided in the mournful aftermath of Sept. 11 that it has a modern-day communications problem.

When the mayor wanted to notify her community of a town vigil to answer the president’s call for a national day of prayer, she didn’t have a way to get the word out quickly. Civic groups provided e-mail addresses for more than 1,000 households, but most of the exclusive hamlet’s 8,000 people were left out of the loop.

Los Altos Hills has no newspaper to call its own, and no downtown to speak of either. Many homes are separated by acres of sprawling countryside and ensconced behind protective gates. The two sheriffs are on assignment from the county.

Mayor Toni Casey wondered what would happen if one day lives were threatened. How could the town, with a staff of 21, warn people that they were in danger?

Since then, the community has tapped its resources, both high-tech and low, to bring itself up to speed with its Information Age surroundings. Town officials sent postcards to every household asking for e-mail addresses and fax and phone numbers.

Leaders say they have lobbied aggressively to encourage local phone company PacBell to make high-speed Internet access available to all residents, and hustled to remove red tape. And a small group of ham radio enthusiasts dusted off the town’s abandoned shortwave equipment and cobbled together a network for future emergencies.

“With the type of creativity and high-tech capabilities we have in Los Altos Hills, we certainly ought to have this available to our residents,” Casey said.

The mayor rattles off half a dozen or so of the high-tech chief executives that she counts among her constituents, including John Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. and James C. Morgan of Applied Materials Inc. Wilfred J. Corrigan, chief executive of LSI Logic Corp., serves on the town’s finance committee.

Responses to the e-mail and phone requests have been short of overwhelming, City Manager Maureen Cassingham said.

“It’s not like everybody would be sitting in front of their computers in an emergency, but this is just one more way we can try to stay in touch,” she said. “Almost everything is on the table these days, from a physical disaster to a terrorist attack.”

Indeed, as past emergencies have shown, the high-tech communications network the city is working so hard to build might be better suited to a chicken pox epidemic than a terrorist attack or a catastrophic earthquake. Fax machines and computers require electricity and working telephone systems, which are easily overwhelmed in times of crisis.

“I don’t want to say it’s a bad idea” to collect phone numbers and e-mail addresses, said Los Altos Hills retiree Scott Overstreet, chairman of the town’s emergency communications committee. “But it turns out that even for a fairly small town, there isn’t enough capacity in a typical switching system to sustain an effort to reach everyone at once. It just doesn’t make too much sense.”

That’s why Overstreet, a former aerospace electronics engineer, and a handful of other ham radio buffs have moved to resurrect the town’s shortwave network.

“I’m trying to build a small group of dedicated operators around the equipment, and then bring in those who are somewhat interested to be available if something really big should happen,” he said. “If we could expect them to come on the radio in an emergency, we might have an eyes and ears system throughout the town.”

Although enthusiasm for ham radio has dampened somewhat in the wake of the Internet and other new communications tools, it remains a popular passion among tech types of a certain age in Silicon Valley.

“We probably have a larger percentage of ham radio licenses in our town than most around here,” said Overstreet, a resident since 1968.

Los Altos Hills is not alone in tapping old technology to prepare for new dangers. Lots of ham radio operators returned to their transmitters in the wake of Sept. 11, said Bill Walters of San Jose, president of the Santa Clara Valley Repeaters Society, an amateur radio club with about 50 members.

Walters also recalled the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, when tens of thousands of residents were without power for days. Walters, a programmer at IBM, was one of hundreds of employees who loaded their radio gear into rented trucks and drove door to door through the Santa Cruz mountains, checking on their co-workers and delivering relief supplies from the company.

“To the extent they have e-mail and cell phones, people will use them to communicate,” Walters said. “If they’re not available, people will use what they have, and sometimes what they have is amateur radio.”