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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."