Events such as Hurricane Katrina can reveal the strength of satellite communications and serve as a catalyst for the deployment of satellite networks by emergency management agencies. Those deployments also can be triggered by simple events such as changes in an in information technology (IT) department that brings satellites to the forefront, and sometimes the scenario can be spurred by a combination of the two.

Changes in everyday life and in the IT department following terrorist attacks in New York City, and Washington, D.C., Sept. 11, 2001, drove the the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management to deploy a ViaSat Inc. Linkstar private satellite network.

“About two or three years ago, we were looking to replace our emergency management information system (EMIS), which is the product used for all of the cities and operational areas basically to communicate back for incident management information,” Rob Sawyer, who designed the network and now is chief of communications for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “We determined in the end that no matter where we put these offices, if we had a large land-based disaster that wiped out a lot of land-based communications lines, we were going to be sunk.”

The destruction of the towers at New York’s World Trade Center highlighted potential weaknesses in Los Angeles’ EMIS, Sawyer said. “After 9/11, when New York City lost its emergency operations center (EOC), which was in the bottom of the World Trade Center, it really became more apparent that we had to work on getting a backup EOC or other methods to get back into the system if we lost the EOC,” he told Satellite News.

But it was basic EMIS architecture coupled with changes in network security that pushed the Office of Emergency Management to seek out a satellite solution for its incident response communications network.

“The real specific incident [that led to deployment] was on the IT side,” Sawyer said. “Because of the way the [EMIS] was set up and security changes, we really lost our terminals and didn’t directly communicate with them. We could communicate with [the terminals], but they weren’t part of our own domain. The Office of Emergency Management had its own domain, and we were [covered] under another system.”

In building that network, the Office of Emergency Management was looking for a network with two key features: reliable, high speed communications that could be used all the time and a backup system. Satellite became the logical answer, and the network expanded from there.

Initially, “we were really thinking about a single mobile satellite dish, taking it out on a trailer or the mobile EOC and setting it up at that place” and the network grew from there to cover a large variety of government agencies in Los Angeles, Sawyer said.