Preparing for Hurricane Season: A guide to planning.

As June marks the beginning of hurricane season, it is important to learn from the past to prepare for the future, especially in emergency preparedness. It is well known that the catastrophic impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast's communications infrastructure. The affects were not only limited to the land mobile radio systems of numerous public safety agencies, but also included the loss of basic infrastructure, such as electrical, telephone and cellular services.

We, at JPS Communications, would like to take this opportunity to offer some preparedness suggestions related to communications interoperability and operability by sharing with you some examples of the many successful deployments of our interoperability technologies and the role they played to support relief efforts during the 2005 hurricane season.

It is extremely important to consider the local, regional and national response needs to support communications interoperability and operability not only during emergency responses but during daily and/or routine situations as well. Following basic protocols on a routine basis will ensure that our equipment, infrastructure and personnel will perform during times of emergencies.

What if?
What if? That is the question often asked as a starting point to preparedness. Ask yourself, what if we loose all electricity, a tower site, Telco, microwave or network infrastructure, our ability to recharge radio batteries? What if we have a lack of fuel for our back up generators and emergency response vehicles or a lack of basic life supporting essentials? While this is an extremely short list, answering such questions before an emergency is a proven way to ensure our success during an emergency.

Considerations
Based on our customer feedback and in field evaluations here are some areas you may want to consider as you finalize your plans for this year's storm season:

Work together.
Working together is the key to communications interoperability. Develop your partnerships, mutual aide agreements, standard operating procedures and the availability of resources (equipment reserves) in your locality, region and state.

Know your contacts.
Know your mutual aide points of contacts and all methods to contact them, cellular, telephone, email, text messaging, fax, etc.

Train and practice.
Training and Practice are two key essentials to ensure all personnel are familiar with communications interoperability procedures and equipment.

Test regularly.
Conduct regular testing of all communications infrastructure to include the availability of service and support, proper radio programming and the sharing of mutual aide and common frequencies throughout your region.

Know the proper procedures.
Embrace and incorporate the procedures of the Incident Command System and the National Incident Management System into your emergency operations plans.

Have available resources.
Develop resource list and adopt private - public partnerships in advance to be able to seamlessly obtain assistance. Many agencies have recently reached out to Amateur Radio Groups for communications assistance; their resources and expertise can be extremely helpful.

Designate a communications leader.
During a response, designate a communications officer to oversee and coordinate communication and interoperability resources as they arrive and deploy.

Follow basic procedures.
To avoid confusion and multiple interoperability patches some basic gateway activation procedures should be followed. They include: requesting authorization for an interoperability patch with participating agency before establishing a patch; utilize plain English transmissions during an interoperability patch and all radio transmissions should identify the agency along with the unit identifier when patching multiple agencies or public safety disciplines.

Take inventory.
When preparing for mutual aide assistance be sure to inventory your available interconnect cables to ensure you have the proper cables for the area or region where you are going to deploy. Likewise, ensure all mutual aid simplex frequencies are preprogrammed into your radios and have available radio programming software and personnel trained to conduct programming if required.

JPS Involvement
During the 2005 hurricane season, the use of JPS technologies supported both communications operability and interoperability on federal, state and local levels. While numerous examples exist of those deployments, it is important to focus on the method of the deployments and the support the ACU technologies provided.

Certainly the protection of life and property is the primary focus during the initial and continued response of both our first and secondary responders. To support that mission a parallel priority is the reestablishment of "operable" communications. As the response escalated and additional resources from outside the region increased, the need for "interoperable" communications surfaced quickly as well.

The tri-state region of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama has a large installed base of ACU-1000 technologies in fixed, transportable and mobile resources. The JPS ACU technologies provide the capability to connect disparate radio, SatCom, telephone and cellular systems, to include iDEN push-to-talk, thus providing communications interoperability. The system can be used as a repeater, provide below ground/grade coverage and are fully network configurable to provide radio over internet protocol (RoIP) links over network infrastructure, wired or wireless using TCP/IP protocols over an Ethernet network. Additional benefits of our RoIP capabilities include reach back over network infrastructure and the wide area connectivity of radio systems outside their radio propagation area and include remote control of the gateway switch. The field configurability and non-computer or network reliance of the ACU technologies are primary factors that support a distributive design, eliminate a signal point of failure and provide mission assurance from a proven and reliable product.