First responders (police and fire rescue) to the attacks in NYC were going into something they have never been trained to respond to with the Twin Towers. Once inside the towers, fire rescuers were going into what I like to call a “dark” situation where there is no communicating with their leaders on the growing situation. Communications throughout the city went down for multiple reasons. First, Verizon had many lines in the bottom of the North Tower and when it collapsed it destroyed all of the communication within those wires. People all around the city were using their phone lines to try to make calls, but this ended up overloading the telephone system. Switching to cell phones caused a 1000% spike in activity over all mobile networks causing the networks to crash. This limited all communications within the city. This disabled communication between the fire rescue crews in the towers making it impossible for headquarters to tell the men in the towers the situation of the instability of the buildings.
The security people in the towers who told the people who worked in the towers to go back to their offices after the first tower fell did the opposite of trying to save lives. This was counter intuitive to the process of trying to save as many lives as possible. I really wondered why security would send people back to their desks after one building collapsed after it was hit by a commercial airliner just as the building they are in was hit by another airliner.
The auto-adaptation needs to happen in all emergency responses no matter what the level of catastrophe. This allows for a better and more effective response to emergencies allowing responders to change their efforts as the situation changes at the scene. The most important part to auto-adaptation is the Information Search and Information Exchange. These two parts to the auto-adaptation are the most important because this needs to happen over and over again during the response and recovery to get updates. This allows the rescue and response crews to change their efforts in a respect to conditions. I believe that city, state, and federal agencies should ensure that for the future emergencies there should be communication systems that can back up any crash of the communication networks (mobile, phone lines, internet). I feel that if the communication systems did not crash more people could have been saved on 9/11.
The video above talks about how Fairfax County, VA updated its emergency communication systems after September 11, 2001. It is a very interesting video how it talked about the different changes that were made for the county. It helps them communication between different agencies across different jurisdictions. It allows fire, police, and helicopters and more agents to communicate effectively to help keep people safer or help reduce the risk of any more harm.
Evan, I feel that you blog post was very well thought out and you did a great job portraying the different types of difficulties that occurred on that tragic day. The part of your post that really hit me the most was that the security personnel in the Twin Towers building did not let people evacuate while the buildings were coming down. I feel like the whole situation was chaotic enough, then on top of it all adding into effect the phones all being out. People these days literally cannot function without their phones whether people are checking the weather to using GPS navigation. The point is people in America and also many other countries are very dependent on their cellular devices.
ReplyDeleteAnother very important part of your blog that I was reading about was the auto-adaption that is needed to occur during terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Cell phones play a critical role in disaster relief and auto-adaptation. Communication is key to make all this possible and if the cell phone towers are down, that severely damages chances of communication with both relief agencies and average people just trying to do their own part in the middle of a crisis situation. Although cell phones are not the only form of communication in these situations, walkie talkies and radios also make for a handy device for disaster relief operatives. Although radios do not have as great of a range as cell phone service, they are a great asset for disaster relief because they will work even if there is a cell phone station overload and all service is lost because they run on their own radio channel.
Overall, I believe you did a great job with this blog post. I learned a lot from this and you seemed to re-enforce a few solid topics from the class discussion. On the other hand, I also feel that you could have worked deeper with more aspects of other technologies besides just the cell phone usage. Finally, I wanted to make you aware that you did very well on your presentation last class. Keep up the good work buddy.