WHO COME RESCUE WITH GUNS?

We went scouting into the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans today to see if there was anything there we could usefully do. There is not.


The 9th Ward had the highest percentage of black home ownership in America. Momma D, over in the 7th Ward, says her mom worked for 50 cents a day to build her house. Many in the 9th Ward aren't any different.

On the way in, the upper 9th and lower 9th further from the levee breach is the territory where people were left on their roofs without food or water for days. When you meet these people and they talk about it, you can still see the fear in their eyes. There are huge messages painted on some of the street intersections that say things like SAVE US and WE NEED HELP.

Some of the people who managed to get to dry ground were held at gunpoint for over a day before being evacuated, whites first, until the crowd remaining was 95% black. Other people who managed to get to dry ground managed to get onto Interstate 10 to walk out of the city. They were stopped on the Mississippi Bridge by Gretna police who reportedly fired on or over the crowd not wanting these people, who the media were portraying as dangerous looters, to go into their white neighbourhood.

In the words of Momma D...”WHO COME RESCUE WITH GUNS?”

- Geoffrey Young

Report from Hammond/Ponchatoula

We held the first AGM for the Resource Action Group at a house in Hammond this afternoon and which was attended also by Mr Richard Lajeunesse, who is a heroic trucker from La Belle Province. RAG, and ourselves as part of it, have several rental trucks dispersed throughout the region. They are all being used and are badly needed but we have decided to pull most of them back in as we are just plain out of money and these trucks are expensive. We joined Kevin on several deliveries between Ponchatoula and New Orleans.

We spent several days between the houses in Hammond and Ponchatoula. Time was spent writing press releases and trying to raise money for Resource Action Group. We got a request for 5-10 thousand contractor sized garbage bags and a couple days were spent calling around to suppliers and manufacturers looking for a sizeable handout. The bags are necessary to remove mould and mould affected items from houses due to the toxic nature of the mould. It is also needed to clean up all the asbestos. Almost half of the roofs in New Orleans are covered with asbestos shingles. It is VERY important that we come up with these bags. Dow Chemical, I think it was their national PR office, seemed on the phone to think we were insane, probably because, as he said, Dow has never given any in kind donation to such a thing.

- Geoffrey Young

Report from the 9th Ward

At the levee breech in the lower 9th Ward, we ran into Donald Lindsay. He is a football coach and school teacher who grew up in the 9th . He gave us a house to house tour of where he grew up, each of the houses being as pictured above. His grandparents house was a concrete slab. The house where he was babysat as a child was several doors down, across the street, on top of another house. The body squad has not been by yet and, as you can see, anybody left in the neighbourhood close to the hole when the levee gave is likely dead.


FEMA has offered the members of Donald's family a whopping $2000 each to turn a piece of the rubble pictured above into a life. They say there will be more later. Meanwhile all of these people's money is running out and the survivors are scattered across all of America. There are no schools open, there weren't enough to begin with, so Donald is working as a roofer.

We will post audio of the interview with Donald taken as we were touring his destroyed neighbourhood once we get hosting space.

- Geoffrey Young

Report from New Orleans

We have spent our time in New Orleans installing, fixing, and trying to track down a bunch of small radios that shoot the internet around. These are called mesh nodes. Some were put on people's houses, one at a bed and breakfast, and there is even a park not too far from the French Quarter with wireless internet. We also did some tech support for a community level radio station and installed a mesh node enabling them to webcast.

The radios were provided by CU Wireless from Champaign-Urbana, who also very graciously donated $2000 toward our travel costs. Sasha Meinrath and CU Wireless were responsible for getting us placed and connected down here in the first place and arranged for safe border passage from the US State Department and FCC.

There are a few others working on the same sort of thing here but it's very hard to get any sort of concentrated effort because there is just too much to be done.

Gordon has his hands on two mobile satellite units from Wanderpod and a lot of time is spent in debate trying to figure out what to do with these things and how. One of them connects to our tech truck (courtesy of Resource Action Group) but is probably more useful somewhere else. Gordon seems set on Houma (First Nation) and he and Will were out looking at a camp in Covington which is just starting up, connected with the folks at plenty.org.

- Geoffrey Young

Joint Press Release - CCRP and Resource Action Group

Volunteers from CCRP are now working with the Resource Action Group in and around New Orleans. More details can be found in our joint press release below:

For Immediate Release

Civilian aid response to hurricane Katrina establishes new paradigm in community based disaster relief.

From the public relations and outreach desk of the Resource Action Group

PONCHATOULA/HAMMOND LOUISIANA. Monday, Nov 21, 2005

As many across the Gulf coast region, and indeed the entire nation watched in disbelief the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, coalitions of common-interested groups and individuals were forming in order to provide direct-community level relief.

From immediate response in isolated communities in Southern Louisiana, to tech support on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and to supply and transportation support in the Algiers community of New Orleans; the Resource Action Group has been one of the most resource effective relief efforts in the region.

Their impact has been consistent as they have been able to provide a considerable range of resources on which the receiving communities depend.

The Algiers community, where RAG was delivering supplies and providing communication tech support to both, the only community clinic and the only distribution/relief centre during the crucial weeks between Katrina and Rita, has become “A light in the darkness for N.O.” according to the Times-Picayune of Nov 1, 2005.

The Resource Action Group has been able to provide truckloads of survival and cleaning supplies to the city of Dulac in the Houma Nation where a department stores stock of shovels was immediately put to use in the community to remove layer upon layer of thick sludge left by catastrophic flooding.

One of the Resource Action Group’s primary projects, NOMESH (The New Orleans Mesh Network) is currently providing a consistently expanding number of public internet access points and wireless “nodes” where residents can access the internet and vital information about recovery programs, find jobs and communicate with loved ones still dispersed across the region. RAG has and will continue to deploy thousands of dollars worth of innovative technology ranging from wireless internet radios which establish internet in a given community to Voice over IP telephony which enable free long distance communication for those in areas where infrastructure has not, and may not for some time, be fully restored.

Between the Hurricanes, the communications support in Algiers enabled countless people to fill out their FEMA forms and trucks containing food water and cleaning supplies from the Resource Action Group were a regular site yet it was and is still almost impossible to keep up with the needs of the various communities the Resource Action group serves. As one New Orleans resident put it, “Palettes upon palettes of water disappear in hours”.

Presently, RAG is supplying trucks to several communities in Louisiana, helping rebuild New Orleans internet at a surprising rate and stepping up scouting activities over the entire affected region. Resource Action Group is also helping in relocation efforts of affected residents.

The responsiveness and success of civilian relief efforts after hurricane Katrina have been historic in proportion, impact and diversity and have changed the way many in the region, the nation and even the world look at their greater global community. As an international organization comprised of organizers, logistical experts, technicians, media professionals, network developers, computer scientists, legal experts, inter-state/national truck drivers and cultural sector professionals, the Resource Action Group is one of the organizations at the forefront of a paradigm shift in citizen responsibility and solidarity which is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook.

We welcome press and community inquiries and look forward to all the help we can get in expanding our profile and activities within the communities affected by the worst natural disaster.

contact@ccrp.info

Second trip

William returned to New Orleans for Halloween, I arrived about a few days after Halloween.

We are staying in an apartment with Gordon Soderberg of Vets for Peace. We are overlooking the levee in Algiers a couple blocks from the Common Ground with a view across the river of the 9th Ward and Downtown.

The Common Ground and Algiers is doing reasonably well. The Times Picayune had a front page story about how Algiers is “a beacon of hope” for New Orleans which misses the point a little because it didn't flood. There are cars parked on the street in front of the houses and people walking around. Most are outside cleaning up their yards, some have a LOT of work ahead of them.

A local guy, who lived 8 or 9 houses down from Common Ground, stopped Will and I today while we were walking by and asked us if we were from the Common Ground. He thanked us profusely and told us that he had been living in the area for years and had not met Maliq [of Common Ground] and that he credited Maliq with looking out for the neighbourhood and helping the community have a place to come back to.

I finally got to see the French Quarter. It ranged from really cool bars, many with live music, on one end, to a touristy section on the other.


- Geoffrey Young

Update - November 7, 2005

After some delays in raising additional funds and border problems, our volunteer William Waites returned to hurricane affected areas last week, thanks to help provided by the Federal Communications Commission, Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, US State Department and others. Geoffrey Young, another CCRP volunteer, is returning to the area in the next couple of days. The CCRP and our volunteers have been asked by the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network Rapid Response Team to continue work on the wireless network being constructed in New Orleans.

We will post updates on our progress as soon as possible as well as a list of our financial supporters, whose generosity allows us to continue our much needed work.

Talk in Winnipeg at 91 Albert St, Oct 14 @ 7 pm

Geoffrey Young is back from the Hurricane affected region and will be giving a talk in Winnipeg on Friday, Oct 14, at 7:00 p.m. The event takes place at the Mondragon cafe and bookstore at 91 Albert St in Winnipeg. Geoffrey will discuss his experience doing relief work in the aftermath of Katrina particularly in light of what has been reported in the corporate press.


Geoffrey, Will and Mike hope to return to Louisiana within the next week, fundraising permitting.

Press - October 3/5, 2005

Check out Mac Dearman's (RadioResponse.org) article for CNN and the recent Associated Press article on communications relief efforts following Katrina. The latter piece has been picked up by several media outlets including CNN, Tallahassee Democrat, Austin American-Statesman, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the South Bend Tribune.

CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

We are a coalition of independently operating groups including the RadioResponse team, ccrp (ccrp.info), some IMCs and several others.

So far our projects have varied widely from establishing communication infrastructure in devastated towns to setting up VOIP and access points in numerous shelters and community groups to be used for filling out FEMA forms and helping area residents track down loved ones. We have also been involved with creating and supporting LPFM stations.

Incidentally to this, we have been involved with arranging cross-border shipments of medications and vaccine, food deliveries and material support of the only operational clinic in New Orleans. You name it, you may well end up doing it.

As Rita was oncoming, the National Guard, Red Cross, etc., fled coastal areas, including New Orleans, leaving civilian operators on their own. One of our primary upcoming projects is the establishment of community access media centres, hopefully at several sites within new Orleans itself. Related tasks include procuring space, possibly providing it with electricity, building wireless mesh networking and then training volunteers in use of the equipment to facilitate both the completion of FEMA forms and the finding of loved ones.

Our approach is a non-hierarchical do-ocracy , any task one sees fit to take on is appreciated and training is a constant state of operation both at the home base in Ponchatoula, LA, and at most of the projects which we support. Required expertise includes any sort of technical knowledge, organizational ability, social engineering, driving and any other which may match this project description. Resources are shared amongst all people working on the projects and as far as is possible within our available resources, nobody goes without unless absolutely necessary.

If this type of work may interest you, please contact Geoffrey Young, geoffrey@groovy.net or Kevin Cupit at kevin@ametrika.com. Ponchatoula operations base can be reached by phone at 303-572-4388.

We wish to stress that there in an infinite amount of work to be done here and our interests are in helping people. People coming only to collect media and adventure tourists are not welcome. We are here to rebuild and provide relief to as many people as possible and we request that our goals and resources be respected as such.

Despite the constant barrage of weirdness, red tape and demoralizing situations, I can personally say that this has been the most rewarding work I have ever done.

solidarity,
Geoffrey Young
geoffrey@groovy.net
(204) 779-3113

The Houma and Laosian Farmers

Since Hurricane Rita, much of our time has been spent arranging shipments of supplies from the Bay St Louis and Waveland into Algiers and Houma territory, both regions which are experiencing either a shortage of resources or a shortage of access to resources. In order to get trucks, we rely on our ability to convince people to do what we ask them. We also rely on luck and the truck mechanics behind the house in Ponchatoula.

Geoffrey got a call today from a woman called Au who was calling from Waveland. She had been in contact with a community of farmers in the Iberia area of Southern Louisiana who had run out of food and were in desperate need of medical assistance. Rumour, which was later confirmed, had it that someone in this community had to amputate an appendage to ward off gangrene. Thanks to Doug from the shop out back in Ponchatoula, we had an 18 foot budget truck on the way to Waveland for filling where it was received by Will, Zev and Mike, loaded with the appropriate supplies and then driven off to where it was needed.

OUR SPONSORS

The CCRP would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the following sponsors (in no particular order):

• Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
• University of Winnipeg
• University of Winnipeg Students Association
• Fidelity Investments
• AIM/Trimark Investments
  
• Carroll Fisher Belding, Attorneys at Law
• CKUW Radio, University of Winnipeg
• Beverly and Gordon Young
• Patricia Belding
• Janice Edwards
• Lynne Belding

We would also like to thank the many people of the affected areas who have provided much generous hospitality and in-kind support to our volunteers on the ground, as well as helpful folks along the way in our trips from Canada.

Update - September 26, 2005

William Waites, one of our volunteers, has just returned to the Ponchatoula base camp from a 2 day trip back to Bay St. Louis, one of the areas hardest hit by Katrina. William has been scouting locations in the area to establish community media access centres that will allow residents to apply for FEMA and other benefits online as opposed to waiting 7+ hours on hold on the telephone. In addition to assisting in the establishment of the wireless networks we are providing computer training and helping residents, some of whom have never used a computer and/or the internet, complete the necessary benefit forms.

Our team also plans to travel to Lake Charles, another hurricane decimated area, in the upcoming week to assess conditions and needs.

The Hammond Daily Star has published a good article about the work we are doing in and around the Ponchatoula area.

IT volunteers help secure communications

DON ELLZEY

PONCHATOULA -- During the two or three days immediately following Hurricane Katrina, communication was one of the major problems throughout the storm ravaged area, from Tangipahoa Parish to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Cell phones did not work, the telephone system was dead and other forms of communication were spotty at best

......

In Ponchatoula, in a the small KD Truck & Trailer Repair building at 298 Tower Road, a group of volunteers with information technology backgrounds have established such a communication system. It is almost impervious to the worst type of disaster, and allows communication with almost any place in the United States, and the world, through the internet.

more....

Update - Ponchatoula

We have begun a project we are calling NOMesh which is a community based wireless network which will provide internet access free of charge to users with a computer and a wireless card. This will be done by setting up dozens of access points around the target neighbourhoods and connecting each to some sort of bandwidth (ranging from home DSL and cable to greater bandwidth connections). The project is being built by Jeff Moe of Colorado (themoes.org), Aleks from Peru who works in Iraq and Jim Patient among others. Pictured is Geoffrey and Mike.





Zev, the warehouse emptying, truck filling cook from Montreal and Kevin, the "head" of the Ponchatoula household, are usually found working very....VERY...hard.

Uniter Article - September 22, 2005

The University of Winnipeg newspaper, The Uniter, has a a great article about the work of our volunteers down south in their September 22, 2005 issue.

Canadian Brothers' Making a Difference in Louisiana

Vivian Belik

To University of Winnipeg student Geoffrey Young, overturned tree stumps, parking lots full of frightened, homeless people and 25-hour days are a far cry from the worries of tuition and overwhelming reading assignments experienced by his fellow classmates back home.

Arriving in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, a small town on the outskirts of New Orleans last Tuesday, Young was faced with the remnants of a once-vibrant area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“This place looks like a garbage dump,” said Young as he stared out over somebody's backyard. “This [area] used to be forest-like, but not anymore. And there's glass absolutely everywhere.”

Traveling to the United States with Montrealer William Waites, Young made arrangements for the pair to assist a group of technological experts in Louisiana who are working to provide communication services to victims of the hurricane. On Sept. 13, Young and Waites joined 28 other volunteers in Ponchatoula about 60 km northwest of New Orleans.

The volunteers, most of whom are IT professionals from across the U. S., built themselves a permanent base camp and quickly formed RadioResponse, a wireless crisis centre that seeks to provide relief to the homeless from New Orleans who have been separated from their family and friends.

“Every imaginable communications expert is down here,” said Young.

Combining forces with other communications groups scattered throughout the area, RadioResponse has been working around the clock to provide wireless access to shelters. Their main efforts have gone towards setting up a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to allow hurricane victims to search for family and friends that may be staying in nearby shelters. Less than two days after the VoIP equipment had been installed, RadioResponse reported that more than 1000 outbound calls had already been placed.

This is good news for hurricane victims who have seen less than satisfying results from their national emergency agency, FEMA.

“People here are very unimpressed [by FEMA's delayed response], that's why there's a bunch of civilians here doing it themselves,” reported Young.

Affectionately referred to as 'our Canadian Brothers,' Young and Waites are much appreciated by the rest of the RadioResponse crew.

“The people I've been working with are just thrilled with [our efforts],” said Young, just days before he and Waites successfully convinced some well-placed individuals in Canada to send a plane-full of hepatitis vaccinations down south.

When asked if he felt that he was out of harm's way, Geoff adamantly replied that “everything is totally under control - we're completely safe.”

Young notes that civil unrest is no longer an issue in New Orleans, due to the police and emergency services that are on the ground, an indication that the images and stories recently being relayed by television stations and newspapers have been over-exaggerated.

“There's been no respect in the media for the people of New Orleans,” said Young.

Aside from providing assistance to RadioResponse, Young is acting as a special correspondent for CKUW's morning news show The Beat, as well as being a representative for the University of Winnipeg's Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort.

In an official news statement released two weeks ago, University of Winnipeg president Lloyd Axworthy announced that the school would like to bring some university students from Louisiana affected by the hurricane to Winnipeg so that they could continue their studies up north. The U of W is ready to waive all tuition fees for students, provide students with counseling services and help make suitable housing arrangements for them.

Canceling all of his courses and leaving his beloved job as news director for The Beat, Young intends to stay in Ponchatoula for several months. The University has supplied Young and Waites with an initial contribution of $500 to aid them in their efforts, but it is an amount that has proven to be insufficient for their purposes.

“We need gas money to get home,” said Young, encouraging those who would like to donate to go to the CKUW offices and make a cheque out to the Canadian Communications Relief Project.

Although Young believes that “there's really no reason a couple of guys from Canada have to come [all the way south to help out with relief efforts],” he considers his stay in Louisiana to be “a really exciting opportunity to prove what people can do when they get together.”

You can follow Geoff Young's progress by tuning into CKUW's The Beat and listening to daily updates, or by checking out RadioResponse.org.

Update - September 24, 2005

Now that Hurricane Rita has passed our team is returning to Bay St. Louis and New Orleans to assess the damage to wireless communications established following Katrina. It appears that Algiers, the New Orleans neighbourhood where Common Ground is based, was left relatively untouched by Rita. We will post further updates soon from our team on the ground.

Check out this link to photos taken at Common Ground Relief Clinic, with whom our volunteers has most recently been working to reestablish communications.

Storm Watch

We sat out Rita in Ponchatoula. There were tornado warnings throughout most of the day. We made kites and got to test fly the StormWatch(tm) brand styrofoam airplane we had. Geoffrey drank some bourbon.


We have gained a meteorologist. Her name is Jen and she lives in Rhode Island. As the bands of Hurricane Rita were going over, she was able to predict weather changes within less than 30 seconds accuracy. The wind would blow the torrential downpour until it fell parallel to the ground. Then all of a sudden it would stop. In the end Geoffrey's hat was ruined, but we were able to keep the network up through most of the storm.

Update - September 22, 2005

A couple days before Hurricane Rita was to hit, we packed up our stuff and evacuated out to Ponchatoula to sit out the storm. We did not feel good about leaving either New Orleans or the Common Ground behind but we just weren't willing to accept the possibility of flash flooding and levee bursts.

Tensions in Algiers the final night were extremely high, largely due to apprehensions caused by disturbances after Katrina hit. Will managed to convince some National Guard to keep a close watch on Common Ground so that they would remain safe after Rita.

Update - September 21, 2005

This is the media centre we helped establish in the house next door to the Common Ground. Inside there are numerous computers, both owned and donated, all hooked up to a wireless modem card. There is also a VoIP phone which allows long distance calling but isn't very clear likely due to the lack of bandwidth. Geoffrey spent several days here helping people fill out FEMA forms and locating loved ones.

As Hurricane Rita was just picking up steam, tensions around the common ground were getting noticeable. Algiers was still pretty much abandoned and curfew was being tightly enforced by both our hosts at Common Ground and the Orleans police. There was one guy who came in about an hour before curfew to fill out his FEMA forms and try and find a loved one. We got through his FEMA forms and were not having any luck finding the guy's sister. At precisely ten to seven, he suddenly jumped out, said "I gotta go its curfew and I gotta get home safe" and suddenly ran out mid way through trying to find members of his separated family.

Update - Common Ground

Maliq Rahim lived in the house that has become the Common Ground community centre. He is seen here talking to some of the soldiers patrolling the area. Aside from tech type work, days at Common Ground were spent unloading trucks of food and supplies which had been brought in from all over the country. Maliq's property was essentially functioning as a free store giving out food, water and other necessities to anybody in the neighbourhood who needed it.

There were about 20 or so volunteers, some of them Canadian, who were helping keep Common Ground going. Among the jobs allotted were covering holes in roofs with tarps, doing check-ins on specific locations within the city, keeping storm drains clear of debris and dead dogs, household duties, clinic support and several other jobs. The Common Ground was also doing initial response and outreach to the Houma Nation in Southern Louisiana. The Houma lost everything in Katrina and it is questionable whether their flooded land can again be viable.



When we first arrived in the Algiers section of New Orleans, this Carnival cruise ship was parked on the levee obscuring part of the skyline. The levee itself was about 800 yards from the Common Ground. It was a small grassy hill with a dirt road at the top beyond which was the Mississippi River.

Update on our progress - September 19, 2005

Our volunteers are lending their communications expertise and assisting a commongroundrelief.org, a locally led and community-run organization offering temporary assistance and mutual aid to the citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Common Ground's team includes doctors, lawyers, aid workers, community organizers, and volunteers of all stripes and creeds.

In the wake of Katrina Common Ground has been providing emergency services including a community garbage pick-up program; mobile kitchens to provide free hot meals to anyone in the area; a first aid clinic in a local mosque and a mobile first aid station staffed by doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians; and bicycles for volunteers and residents to transport aid around the area; animal rescue; and has been developing a free school for children. Common Ground also operates a medical clinic and community centres.

Reporters from CNN were on hand today covering the activities of the organization including members of our team helping people fill out FEMA forms online. The San Francisco Chronicle has also written an interesting article describing Common Ground's relief efforts.

Tomorrow evening our volunteers are planning to evacuate the area due to the approach of tropical storm Rita along with others back to the Ponchatoula staging area of the RadioResponse.org team, with whom they have also been working to reestablish communications capacity to affected communities.

New York Times Article - September 18, 2005

The New York Times has written an interesting article about WiFi systems and refers to our work, along with other volunteers including the Wireless Community Networks (WCN) project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, helping to reestablish communications after Katrina. Here are some excerpts.


Talking in the Dark

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: September 18, 2005
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/magazine/18idea.html

To understand what makes WiFi useful in a catastrophe, consider some frailties of our regular phone-company communications. Phone systems are reliable on a day-to-day basis, but they have a key vulnerability: They’re centralized. In any city, a handful of central “switches” handle the work of routing local phone calls. During 9/11, several important switches were located across the street from the World Trade Center and were damaged in the towers’ collapse, blacking out parts of New York.

To make matters worse, phone systems are rarely designed to allow more than 10 percent of the population to talk simultaneously, and far more people than that rush to the telephone in an emergency. In the New York City blackout of 2003, while most land lines continued to function, the cellphone circuits were overjammed.

Katrina posed even worse problems. As phone traffic surged, the water was destroying a vast area, including underground phone lines. Mobile-phone networks, too, were ruined, because they’re routed through communication towers that crumpled like paper in Katrina’s 140-mile-an-hour winds. As a final insult, Katrina knocked out the power grid in swaths of the Gulf Coast - which was fatal for phone systems that require thousands of watts of juice. The surviving mobile-phone sites in New Orleans could run on diesel-generator backup, but with just one tank of gas each, they were capable of operating for only a few days. Even the mayor nearly lost contact with the outside world. After their satellite phones ran out of power, employees of the mayor’s office broke into an Office Depot and lifted phones, routers and the store’s own computer server.

-----------------------------------------
WiFi meshes elegantly dodge our phone system’s central problems. They’re low-power and ultracheap - and decentralized like the Internet itself, which was initially conceived to withstand a nuclear attack. You can use WiFi to build a do-it-yourself phone system that is highly resistant to disaster.

-----------------------------------------
WiFi does have its limitations. To begin with, an antenna can communicate with another antenna only if it has a clear line of sight. But because the system is so inexpensive, it wouldn’t be difficult to address this problem by placing antennas closely together in congested areas. Of course, a WiFi mesh wouldn’t work if its users had no supply of electricity. And emergency responders and the military will always need to rely on their own high-quality two-way radios and satellite phones. But for the rest of us, when disaster next strikes, WiFi meshes could be the clever system that keeps people in contact - from house to house.

Update - September 18, 2005

Geoffrey Young, one of our volunteers, has sent some photos taken in and around the New Orleans area. The first three pics are of St Claire Catholic church and school, in Waveland LA.






The following 2 photos are of John MacFarlane standing in front of his $200,000.00 home. John was in a wonderful mood because he and his wife survived. The last photo is of his neighbourhood.

Updates on our progress

The RadioResponse.org website has updates on our progress through the Bay St. Louis area and in New Orleans.

CCRP Press Release - September 14, 2005

The Canadian Communications Relief Project assists in relief efforts in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina

On Sunday Sept. 11, Geoffrey Young and William Waites of the Canadian Communications Relief Project Inc. (CCRP) were deployed in Rayville, Louisiana as part of the WISPA initiative which is providing Internet and communications access to hundreds of shelters in the state and surrounding areas.

CCRP has also received requests from organizations in New Orleans to aid in the establishment of radio broadcasting and communication facilities at several different locations in that city.

WISPA is comprised of wireless experts from across the continent that are in the affected areas on their own personal money, leaving life, business and family behind in order to come together and provide what relief their expertise allows. Thus far, the WISPA initiative has been responsible for putting numerous families in touch with loved ones feared dead after Katrina hit.

The CCRP is a registered non-profit organization created with the express purpose of providing aid to Hurricane Katrina survivors in the form of communication expertise, one of the most needed resources at this time. For more information and to monitor our progress visit:
http://katrina.cnt.org/wordpress/

The CCRP is also part of a coordinated effort with the University of Winnipeg to locate needy students affected by Hurricane Katrina. The University of Winnipeg has agreed to waive tuition fees, assist with registration, link affected students with health and counseling services, and help arrange housing. The university will also offer information technology support to assist a university or college in the affected area.

Reports on the progress of the project will be also be available as communication allows on Mon, Tues and Weds mornings of CKUW's morning show, The Beat, which airs 8-9 am on CKUW radio, 95.9FM in Winnipeg as well as online at CKUW.ca.

The members of CCRP on the ground in the south are there on their own personal savings and are reliant on donations in order to stay down south and continue their work in order to help as many as possible of the 1+ million people who have had their lives destroyed and are missing family and friends. Our members hope to stay in the affected areas as long as they are needed and the CCRP is also looking into sending additional volunteers to help.

Donations should be made out to the Canadian Communications Relief Project Inc. and can be dropped off at CKUW, University of Winnipeg radio, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba or sent by mail to Carroll Fisher Belding, 1-1549 St. Mary's Road, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R2M 5G9.

CCRP welcomes all media inquiries and we will do what we can in order to arrange interviews/communications with our people on the ground in the south. Availability will be dependant on the level of devastation in the various communities as well as the speed with
which CCRP and WISPA volunteers can build news communications infrastructure with affected communities

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Geoffrey Young is the news director at community radio CKUW in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has background in journalism and is currently taking international development studies at University of Winnipeg.

William Waites is a network communications engineer living in Montreal. He has developed Internet and VoIP networks in sectors ranging from the academic to corporate telecommunications firms. He is a pioneer in Internet broadcast streaming with slightly less than 10 years experience.

Stacey Belding is a lawyer in private practice who previously worked in communications in the non-profit sector. Kent Davies is a University of Winnipeg student and volunteer coordinator with CKUW radio. Kent and Stacey are working from Winnipeg to assist with the
efforts of the CCRP volunteers down south.

For more information about WISPA, contact: Mac Dearman, (318) 728-8600.

For more information about the University of Winnipeg's assistance offer, contact: Katherine Unruh, Director of Communications, (204) 782-3279 or Ilana Simon, Communications Officer, (204) 786-9930.

University of Winnipeg Press Release - September 9, 2005

The University of Winnipeg is reaching out to students affected by last week’s devastating hurricane Katrina.

Effectively immediately, the University will:
– Waive tuition fees for students in need – facilitate registering affected students in courses related to their area of study.
– link affected students with health and counselling services
– help make housing arrangements for students in need
– offer information technology support to assist a university and/or college in the affected area

On the ground in the US south, The University of Winnipeg is supporting our student efforts. Geoffrey Young, a UWinnipeg student and News Director of 95.9FM CKUW our University radio station, and colleague William Waites are on their way to the affected area to help establish communications links (the University has made an initial contribution of $500 to support this student effort).

The announcement was made by President Lloyd Axworthy at the University OmniTrax/Broe War Affected Children confrence taking place on campus today and all day Saturday, Sept 10th, 2005.

Recent Press - Washington Post and others

washingtonpost.com
Wireless Networks Give Voice To Evacuees

By Arshad Mohammed
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 9, 2005; A15

Hurricane Katrina survivor Caprice Butler had been at a church shelter in rural northeastern Louisiana for nearly a week when she finally heard her husband's voice on an Internet phone running on an improvised wireless network.

"I was just overjoyed," she said yesterday, tearing up as she spoke outside the church in the farming town of Mangham, about 200 miles from her flooded New Orleans home. "Words can't explain how I felt."

If the Butlers manage to reunite this weekend, as they hope, it will be because of a band of volunteer techies who are stitching together wireless networks at shelters across northeastern Louisiana using radio transmitters mounted on such items as a grain silo and a water tower.

With few reliable communications systems in place, people and companies from around the country are converging on the region to create improvised networks that give survivors and emergency personnel ways to talk and coordinate efforts.

While local telephone and wireless networks are slowly coming back, they remain spotty or nonexistent in some places, and fire, police and other rescue personnel have complained about the lack of a unified emergency communications system. To meet the needs of evacuees in Jackson, Miss., Dulles-based America Online has parked an 18-wheel truck at the Mississippi State Fairgrounds, a major shelter, with a satellite dish on top and 20 computers with Internet access inside. At the Houston Astrodome, volunteers have obtained a Federal Communications Commission license to set up a low-power radio station and are now struggling to get permission from local officials to broadcast to evacuees inside the stadium.

F4W, a Lake Mary, Fla., company, is under government contract to provide Internet phones and online access to Coast Guard officers cleaning up oil spills, using a portable satellite dish and handsets often deployed in forest fires.

The network at Mangham Baptist Church was the brainchild of Mac Dearman, a wireless Internet service provider who was driving past the church last week when he saw a group of parked cars, realized they were people who had fled the hurricane and set about providing relief, including food, clothing and online access.

Dearman hooked up a radio transmitter near the church and linked that to a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone and a computer, and suddenly the dozens of people taking refuge at the church had the ability to reach out to the outside world.

Mostly, they are searching for loved ones and filling out Federal Emergency Management Agency forms to get disaster aid.

"They just call from shelter to shelter to shelter looking for their kids or for their daddies or their brothers because they got separated, and they are just finding each other in the last few days," Dearman said, adding that people were often overwhelmed when they connected.

"They cried big tears, hugged my neck, shook my hand and patted me on the back. You'd have thought I was really giving them something that cost a lot of money," he added.

Dearman is working entirely with donated labor and equipment.

People from as far afield as Nebraska, Missouri and Indiana are camped out in his house, coordinating equipment deliveries, searching for shelters that need service, and then sending out volunteers to climb towers to hook up radio antennas and set up the networks.

"We are basically completely bypassing the phone system," said Matt Larsen of Scottsbluff, Neb., who said he was perched on a bar stool with his laptop at Dearman's kitchen counter.

Dearman estimated that he had run wireless links to about a dozen shelters near his home base of Rayville, La., but only about half were up and running because he had run out of equipment.

He was expecting fresh donations of secondhand computers, VoIP phones and wireless equipment. Once he has those in hand, he said, he hopes to extend to shelters closer to New Orleans and to Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

"It's been a godsend," said the Rev. Rick Aultman, pastor of Mangham Baptist Church, where about four dozen people are staying.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company



Technology Daily

Wireless Experts Aid Hurricane Victims
By Drew Clark

(Monday, September 12) Technology professionals proficient in wireless Internet access have established high-speed connections in at least 15 relief centers in northern Louisiana -- prompting many to argue for stronger policy incentives to create community and municipal broadband networks.

"We brought in PCs, voice-over-Internet protocol phones, and the wireless broadband links to make them useful," said Mac Dearman, owner of Maximum Access, a Louisiana-based wireless Internet service provider organizing a response for victims of Hurricane Katrina on behalf of the Wireless Internet Service Provider Association.

Evacuees used the VoIP phones over Wi-Fi connections to call relatives. "You wouldn't believe how many hugs we got," Dearman said.

"In a six-hour period Sunday, there were 10,000 VoIP calls from the shelters," added Rick Carnish, also of WISPA -- one of two associations representing wireless broadband providers and working on relief efforts related to the hurricane.

The other major group, part-15.org, was prepared to provide wireless Internet capabilities to evacuees sent to Fort Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, with 500 routers and 200 Internet phones provided by Cisco Systems and Vonage. But SBC Communications wired the relief center before part-15.org could set up shop.

"We were being told by the Red Cross information technology department that our services were needed," said Michael Anderson of part-15.org, an association of wireless ISPs that takes its name from the portion of the FCC regulations governing communications over "unlicensed" radio frequencies.

"We had teams standing by for an entire week. We transferred those needs to other assets, closer to the destruction area just outside New Orleans and just outside the Biloxi city limits," he said, referring to one of the Mississippi cities hardest hit by the storm.

Wireless Internet connections are proving to be a significant means of communication in and out of the disaster area, and some people are using the occasion to argue that more spectrum should be allocated for unlicensed devices, such as those using the Wi-Fi standard.

Others note that disaster relief and homeland security become important additional reasons to establish municipal broadband networks.

"There has been a lot of publicity on the Philadelphia" municipal broadband network but "less on Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, Texas, which were primarily designed for public safety," said Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman and now an advocate and board member of several wireless companies.

"Oklahoma City had its own experience with tragedy, and Corpus Christi, which is certainly not unaware of hurricanes, wanted networks that would help with first responders," Hundt added.

Both cities have established Wi-Fi networks as a way for police and firefighters to communicate in emergencies.

Because the technologies user lower power than traditional radio-frequency communication, it becomes easier to provide backup batteries that last longer, experts said.

Hundt said Congress should create a $1 billion equipment fund for emergency responders to use Wi-Fi. He also urged the FCC to devote six megahertz of spectrum near the digital television band -- in addition to 24 megahertz to be freed in the digital television transition -- for first responders.



Volunteers rebuild Gulf Coast communications with wireless nets

By John Cox, Network World, 09/16/05

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a volunteer group of network and wireless experts has moved from outfitting small northeastern Louisiana shelters with wireless Internet access and VoIP phones to preparing a desperately needed 45M bit/sec wireless pipe for the entire relief effort in devastated Bay Saint Louis, Miss.

"I've never witnessed destruction like this," says Paul Smith, technology director with the Center for Neighborhood Technology , a Chicago non-profit devoted to making cities more livable. He's one of scores of network volunteers from all over the country who are creating one of the few success stories to emerge from Katrina's demolition of the Gulf Coast's technology infrastructure.

As of this week, the emergency management staff of this town of about 8,000 people, plus National Guardsmen; Red Cross workers; and local police, fire and government are relying on a couple of satellite connections, each supporting a 2M bit/sec downlink and just a 512K bit/sec uplink. One of the links had been set up at the Hancock County Medical Center by local U.S. Navy staff. The second was at NASA's Stennis Space Center, where the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is based, coordinating all local, state and federal relief efforts in the area.

Outbound GSM cellular voice calls could be made fairly reliably, but inbound calls were overwhelming the battered cell networks, Smith says.

By the end of this coming weekend, volunteers are expected to have up and running a 45M bit/sec broadband wireless connection hopping from a Bay Saint Louis water tower west some 76 miles to Hammond, La. "We've been given access by the EOC to pretty much the city's entire infrastructure," Smith says. That means the volunteer team can commandeer one of the water towers outside town for the main backhaul connection, essentially a commercialized, high-powered 802.11a 54M bit/sec radio.

These devices, running in the unlicensed spectrum, require line-of-sight alignment. The link will probably make two intermediate hops before terminating in Hammond, La.

Spoking out from the water tower, other wireless links on 2.4- and 5.8-GHz bands will carry throughput to 25 shelters around the town, the medical center and most importantly to the EOC.

In some cases, Smith expects to deploy a wireless LAN mesh, using open source software from the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network project , and hardware from Metrix Communications: single-board computers in a weatherproof housing, 802.11a/b/g radio cards, and Power over Ethernet to simplify deployment.

At each of these sites, PCs, laptops, and a combination of VoIP phones and VoIP-enabled analog phones will be able to access the radio bandwidth through a router or a switch.
Local action

This basic technology pattern and the entire volunteer wireless effort grew out of the decision by a former Mississippi river towboat captain turned wireless broadband provider to set up a similar arrangement at the Mangham Baptist Church in neaby Mangham, La., about 240 miles northwest of New Orleans.

Mac Dearman is CEO of Maximum Access, a wireless ISP (WISP) serving a large rural area around Rayville. The day after Katrina struck, he stopped at the church because it was crowded with cars, which was highly unusual given it was a Tuesday. He found scores of evacuees and realized everyone was trying to use the one phone in the church office. With one of his wireless towers visible nearby, Mac and his brother Jay, a local pastor, set up a premises radio, a couple of spare PCs and a couple of VoIP phones.

Evacuees were able to start registering on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Web site, entering their names in the missing people databases, searching for relatives and calling them, at a time when government officials and emergency management crews could hardly communicate with each other.

Dearman started getting calls from other area churches, all of them sheltering evacuees and all with the same pressing need for communications. After about four days, Dearman e-mailed colleagues about what he was doing via a listserv at the Wireless ISP Association (WISPA ), which by then was working with another industry group of WISPs, Part-15.org , on ways to use wireless gear and expertise to restore communications.

Almost at once donations started flowing in, $1,100 within 30 minutes of Dearman's first e-mail. The next day, Jim Patient, president of Jeffco SOHO, a WISP in House Springs, Mo., showed up with a van loaded with relief supplies and time to spend working alongside Dearman. People kept arriving, from Seattle to Buffalo and everywhere in between, bringing still more supplies, equipment, money and unflagging energy despite the clinging, wet heat and fire ants.

After a conference call organized by the FCC on Friday, Sept. 9, Part-15 was given the job of coordinating volunteer efforts, and WISPA's officers threw their support behind that. Both groups used their e-mail lists and Web sites to promote the cause and provide channels for contributions of money and gear. Part-15 members were also streaming into the Gulf Coast area, working with local WISPs to restore their networks and creating new ones. "We can create voice and data services, of any magnitude, within 48 hours of arrival," says Michael Anderson, chairman of Part-15.
Two miles of Cat 5

In days, the growing volunteer crew based at Dearman's home had equipped over a dozen shelters in the Rayville area, stringing nearly two miles of Category 5 cable, giving hundreds of evacuees data and voice communications. By Monday, Sept. 13, less than a week after starting, the open source Asterisk IP PBX server being used had handled over 10,000 outbound calls, according to Jeffco's Patient. "And we don't tax the public phone network," he says. "On the public net, you have to call 15 times to get a connection. With our stuff, you get dial tone and you make the call."

When Patient returned to one shelter with another PC, one evacuee threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "She said 'God bless you, I found my brother,'" Patient says.

By the middle of last week, about 30 volunteers had moved south to Ponchatoula to work on outfitting additional shelters as well as addressing the Louisiana side of the wireless pipe for Bay Saint Louis. "The move came at the behest of two non-profits working in the Mississippi town: Inveneo, which designs affordable technology for developing countries, and CityTeam Ministries , which works with the homeless and poor in seven U.S. cities."
Frustrations

There have been plenty of frustrations, too. Local Red Cross chapters repeatedly refused to let WISPA volunteers set up wireless connections to their facilities, according to Dearman, relying instead on a single DSL line in some cases, and in one case on pay phones.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology's Smith brought down a batch of Pentium 3 PCs donated to the center, which reloaded them with the Linux operating system and a batch of open source software applications, including the Firefox browser. The computers worked fine for everything except what is arguably the most important application: the registration forms on the FEMA Web site.

After hours of troubleshooting, Smith found that FEMA requires the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, and no other. "And it's just a simple HTML form," Smith says. "It doesn't need the use of some special IE-only feature." Valuable hours were spent tracking down, and paying for, Windows licenses.

After going 72 hours without a shower, Smith says his odor started frustrating co-workers. They dragged him downtown where something perhaps even more valuable at that moment than wireless broadband had been set up: a semi-trailer rigged up with shower cubicles, a changing area and pressurized hot water.

All contents copyright 1995-2005 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com



The News Star
Article published Sep 9, 2005
Web link helps those in shelter

By Ian Morrison
imorrison@monroe.gannett.com

Most people wouldn't see Mangham as a technological hub, but Lewanda Stewart's stay in the town has convinced her to buy a computer someday.

Stewart, along with nine other family members, ended up at the Mangham Baptist Church shelter last week after fleeing Hurricane Katrina.

Stewart and her brother-in-law Cammie Mathis spent most of Thursday afternoon, and any free time they've had this last week, glued to a computer with wireless Web access at the shelter.

"I'm definitely going to have to get one now," Stewart said and laughed. On Thursday, she and her brother-in-law were looking up housing information on FEMA's Web site. Over the last couple of days, they've used the Internet to look up storm information, find various loved ones and to avoid waiting in line at the Monroe Civic Center for FEMA assistance.

"This has been excellent," Mathis said.

Stewart and Mathis, along with evacuees at 11 other shelters in rural northeastern Louisiana, all have Maximum Access owner Mac Dearman to thank.

Dearman, who runs the wireless Internet service provider out of Holly Ridge, has been spending every day of the last week along with 22 other network and computer industry employees installing phones and computers at shelters in towns such as Tallulah and Delhi.

"I noticed some shelters popping up in the area, and I thought they'd have a lot to accomplish and no way to do it," Dearman said.

Though phone service has been spotty in rural areas since the hurricane, the phones Dearman and his cohorts have been installing use a technology called Voice over IP and never go down because they're routed over the Internet, unlike regular phone lines or cell phones.

"I just thought we needed some hands to get down here," said Nebraska resident Matt Larsen, who flew in this week to help Dearman.

Larsen is one of the 22 friends and acquaintances who've made the trip to the area over the last week to stay at Dearman's home, lend a hand and pitch a tent in his back yard.

They've come from places like Seattle and Chicago. Two more are coming this week from as far as Ontario, Canada.

"It's been really neat," said Rick Aultman, pastor at the church. "We just wouldn't have thought about doing this kind of thing."