Communications Link That SAVED LIVES in New Orleans after Katrina

[Nauvoo2002]

As a ham radio operator, I always thought that it would be ham radio that would save the day after a disaster.

Well, it often times does.

But after Katrina in August/September of 2005, it was not ham radio communications that saved lives.


It was cell phone TEXT MESSAGING that is credited for saving several dozen people's lives in the St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans 9th Ward areas.

Both of these areas flooded after the levees broke, forcing a number of people into their attics to escape the rapidly rising flood waters.

Some of the folks who escaped into the attic thought to bring axes or saws with them, and were able to cut a hole in the roof to get out where rescuers could see them. Some had windows and were able to open them to call out for help.

But there were alot of folks who did not have axes with them, nor windows in their attic. They escaped the flood waters, but they had no way out of the attic. Cell phones ultimately feed into the land line phone network (at least they did in 2005 -- I have to admit, I don't understand this "3G" business), so even with the cell companies rushing portable cell phone towers down into the affected area as quick as they did, the land line backbone that still existed was overloaded.

There was no way for somebody down in the New Orleans area to get a live, voice telephone call out of the New Orleans area during the daytime in those days right after Katrina hit. But the long distance telephone service into the New Orleans area seemed to free up after about 9 pm at night, and I found that I could call into my father who was still down there after 9 pm. It took only four to six tries, on average, to get throughthat late at night -- which was pretty good, all things considering. Yet he could not get a voice telephone call through at any time of the day or night.

That was great for me and my father, but that did nothing for those unfortunate soles trapped in their attics with no way to get out, and no way to call for help.

But there turned out to be one way that the folks trapped in the attics were able to get a message out -- text messaging.

It has to do with how text messages are transmitted.

I'm no phone expert. Maybe somebody knows more about it, and post more of the mechanics of the process here.

But my understanding of what happened is this: they were able to get the message to the tower, and the towers have some kind of computer equipment on them that records the text messages as they hit the tower.

The reason that the voice cell phones did not work for real time voice calls was because the landline trunk was overloaded.

But the computer was storing the messages, and then transmitting them through the system when there was an opening to transmit information through. The computers do that automatically.

These folks were sending text messages to relatives in places outside New Orleans. Once the computer got the text message out, it would go on to its intended recipient, wherever he or she was located.

Messages might have read something like this:

"Aunt Sally, I'm stuck here in the attic at 1234 Gumbo Waterway, please send help"

Aunt Sally would then call somebody -- maybe local law enforcement, maybe the Red Cross, maybe they even tried to get in to the Louisiana Highway Patrol or FEMA.

At any rate, Aunt Sally would get to some emergency type person who, in turn, would channel that information down to rescuers on the scene in the greater New Orleans area. They now knew to go over to 1234 Gumbo Waterway to check for flood victims in the attic.

Several dozen are known to have been rescued as a direct result of their getting messages out through Text Messaging.

And the tragic correlary to this story is that a number of bodies were discovered in attics after the water finally went down. Folks who were never able to get the message out, and as a result, died a hot and lonely end in their New Orleans home's attic.

[AZ Prepper]

Interesting. I guess it would be wise to have a cell phone and HAM radio capabilities just in case one of them was out.

[TrisaTx]

It was the same in Houston after Hurricane Ike. The only reliable form of communication was text messaging.

Trisatx