On 2017-10-02 02:58, Wayne Bouchard wrote: > Well, that's why recovery efforts in broad scale events like this have > to go from a central point to pushing a perimiter farther and farther > out. Create a habital, functional zone where workers can return to > both to organize and recouperate and then go back out and push farther > afield.
Logic yes. But... I have read stories of sick people in shelters dying because of lack of electricity, lack of O2. Stories of FEMA sending water/food for only half of population of a village. This is where telecom plays a role. If the shelter had comms, it could have told mayor "we need generator, we need 5 tabks of O2 for sick people". Mayor could have sent request to FEMA ASAP. My **guess** is that by the time FEMA got the requests, it was too late and people died. In hindsight, every village should have been given a sat-phone BEFORE the hurricane, Ajit Pai complained about iPhone not having FM radio. But it is more important for reverse communication from villages to headquarters/FEMA to be able to transmit urgent needs, status reports, how much food/water needed etc. I suspect that if such comms had happened right off the bat, they would have known that waiting for roads to be cleared wasn't sufficient and taken a different philosophy for immediate help. I think that disaster planners have made wrong assumptions about cellular and terrestrial communications being robust enough to survive cyclones.
