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District Looks to Lead the Way in Crisis Technology
Fire officials, from left, Demetrios Vlassopoulos, John Donnelly and Brian K. Lee watch broadband images of a fire. The District has worked on improving communications for emergency personnel.
(Lois Raimondo / Post)
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U.S. Park Police officers have used the system to check criminal databases from the field to determine whether individuals they stopped had outstanding arrest warrants, officials said.
"WARN was able to satisfy almost all expectations," the Commerce Department report said.
But not all.
On Inauguration Day, even the WARN system became overloaded, "bringing into question the adequacy of a single broadband channel for a city the size of the District," the report said.
Still, the system has been so useful that local and state governments in the Washington area are spending millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants to try to expand it regionally. As for the District, officials are hoping to add users and eventually incorporate voice and data transmission.
Christopher Geldart, the Homeland Security Department coordinator for the Washington area, said the WARN system was an example of the next stage in emergency communications.
Tragedies such as the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina exposed serious flaws in the ability of police and firefighters to talk to each other. Such basic problems have been largely solved in the Washington area, which got top marks in a report card on emergency communications issued by Homeland Security in January.
But the region still faces a daunting task when it comes to sharing criminal records and other information.
"There's multiple layers to this thing. It's not just the fireman talking to the cop on the radio. It's also how do we share data, how do we share information in a common way," Geldart said.
"We are much better off today than we were at 9/11," he said. "However, there's still a long way to go."
