I do not think the aftermath of the storm bothered the dog in the slightest. As far as he is concerned, the weather has broken, the pre-dawn sky is clear, and the temperature is exactly that: temperate. He Almost time to open the windows and let the clean fresh air inside, communicate with the outside world after the humidity of the summer is washed away.

He joined me in the alternate condo upstairs at Big Pink  around 2130. We tried to watch TV but it didn’t work. You would think there would be more to the start of a three day weekend, but it is funny how age tempers enthusiasm for anything but sleep.

I reclined on the Big Bed and that was that, right until the dog made a supercanine leap to join me there when the BBC came on. The clock-radio is still set for weekday time, and as far as he is concerned, it was time for the morning parade around the grounds. He communicated his need with his cold nose on my face, and I roused.

I don’t live in the new Condo, not yet. It has furniture and the bed, and the good artwork and the big TV and the DVD player.  I don’t know why I don’t spend much time here. Maybe it is like an old convict, comfortable with the size of the old cell. But my son was planning a big evening in town, and I preferred to loan him the Murphy bed in the little unit rather than have him driving out to the County in the wee hours, when the powers of evil are exalted.

I hope the leaping up and down does not hurt the dog’s back; he has some dachshund blood in him and his back is longer and more sensitive than he needs. I sympathize with him. The knee was particularly hard to operate this morning, and I hobbled to the kitchen, marveling at the new cabinets I own, and the dishwasher, and the fancy coffee-maker with the grinder for the beans built right in.

I have been living a lot more simply. Not as simply as the people down south are. I thought that maybe I should offer one of the places to the newly homeless.

I don’t know what the Condo Association at Big Pink would think of that. I suspect a dim view, if Mrs. Hitler had anything to say about it. She doesn’t like renters, and wouldn’t talk to me at all until I purchased the efficiency unit. Now that I own two of them, I am regular people in her book.

We did our business- twice- on the dawn patrol; him producing and me picking up the product in plastic bags. We like to keep the place neat, and with the dog comes responsibility. Dawn was just slowly coming, and there was time to think about what we should have done about the disaster in the soft air. The dull ache in my knee made me wonder if I could get through the Big Game in Baltimore later in the day. It seemed a long way away.

When the dog was satisfied, we went back upstairs and I glanced at the Times. Shailia Dewan had a report on communications in the Gulf towns that was a real tear-jerker. She had some anecdotes about folks hanging around coroner’s offices trying to establish the whereabouts of their loved ones. It was tough stuff. Mothers looking for children, husbands swept away.

The internet message boards are helping to sort things out, but of course your computer would have to be dry, or the line short enough at the Red Cross to get at one.

The telephones are still out, land line and cell both. Shailia was over near what used to be Gulfport, and she reported that only half of the city of Bay St. Louis had been searched for the missing. That got my attention. There was a big Navy facility there, ironically the John C. Stennis Meteorological Center, and I knew some people who were assigned there. There was no way to communcate with them, though.

The wireless companies are trying to reestablish service, but it is hard. I won’t bore you with how it all works, but the short story is that without the cell towers there is no way to connect the only real wireless part of the system with your handset. All the rest of it is landlines and computer servers and switching nodes.

One of the companies in Gulfport put out a sign that said “free calls,” and 1,500 people lined up over two days to make a call.  But by yesterday, the office had run out of fuel for the generator that powered its signal tower.

The National Disaster Mortuary Service used to work for my office when I was at Health and Human Services, and I had a certain grim interest in how they were doing now that they report to the Department of Homeland Security. The regional commander says  communications systems were not in place to share information with other relief agencies.

I had to snort in disgust. I clicked out of the current dister and looked at the opinion columns about disaster.

I am generally opposed to it, and found that I was in agreement with dyspeptic Maureen Dowd’s daily invective. She was railing about the twenty years of bipartisan cuts to the infrastructure. They have affected everything.

Eeven the force structure of the Services.  We configured the USS Coronado as the most advanced command-and-control capaqbility in the world. It had three major command centers that could have been used by State and local commanders and integrated direct into the NORTHCOM military structure. It was slick, and it was wonderful and the Navy decommissioned it because it was too expensive and there are ship with missiles and guns that need to be purchased.

You should have heard the Fleet Commanders whine about the expense of maintaining the hospital ships USNS Mercy and Comfort, the latter of which is enroute to the Gulf as I write.

The failure to plan- or plan badly- is nothing I can influence. But I have a revolutionary technology in my briefcase which I have been shopping around town. It is literally a cell netowrk in a single box, small as a laptop computer. With a power source (battery is fine) and an antenna, I can provide service to 500 handsets, with a capability to conduct six simultaneous conversations. I can double that with additional boxes, a doxen of which I could put in the trunk of a squadcar.

It does not depend on cell towers communications with a routing center and a server someplace, it is good to go right out of the box. My company developed the box for some customers who would prefer to remain nameless, and hence have been nervous about marketing it.

This could have been the means for the authorities to talk well beyond the range of the motorola land-mobile radios, and manage the response. But the compnay does not want to sell the technology, since it would compete with existing and much more expensive cell archtitectures that rely on towers and expensive infrastructure.

There is an issue with the system, though. It represents what is known in the business as a “disruptive technology,” a game-changing capability that is so radical and advanced that it can effectvely leap-frog a profitable existing business. The is, of course, no guarantee that the revenue can be replaced, and by introducing the new the company could be at risk of putting itself out of business..

So the company is nervous, and there is a fair amount of hang-wringing. But I am still too close to the responders to care. They just need the capability to communicate.

My case is that we market it only as a tool for incident managers in situations where existing infrastructure is blown away. We would offer no competition to the Spints or T-Mobiles; our capability would be limited to the responders and not attempt to deal with the general public.

And, by the way, we can operate the system in places like Darfur, or in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a commercial. The issue is way complicated for reasons of policy. Communications is really as much about electromagnetic spectrum as it is the little boxes that broadcast on it. The Government allocates the spectrum, as if it owned the physics of the universe. They even auction off chunks of it from time to time, and that is another one of the problems with my little box.

The TV broadcasters have been told to vacate some spectrum over the next few years, and it would be just dandy if we saved a little bit of it for the cops and the firemen and the National Guard to communicate on. But there is money, and disruptive technology involved. So things are a little complex. and the disaster is just going to play itself out until the phone companies sort themselves out.

I remember when “phone company” was a singular, not a plural noun.

But like I say, I sam still too close to the responders to care much about that. I just think the New Orleans cops should have been able to talk to one another when the winds died down.

Don’t you?

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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