Congratulations to all you guys for your hard work and great efforts
down south. You made the Washington Post! Woo-Hooo!
Scriv
Mike Healy wrote:
Found this in the Washington Post this morning......... Thought y'all
would be interested in seeing it.
You guys are doing great things down there. I only wish I had the
means to be able to join you. I had hoped to get a bunch of surplus
PCs to send to you but due to my employer being in bankruptcy we
aren't able to do that.
Mike
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090802058.html?referrer=email
*washingtonpost.com* <http://www.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
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