I'm attempting to blog from my Treo because my network card is acting up. Grrr...
Glenn has a great post up about communications.
I wasn't able to find that stuff about commo at CALL that I wanted to. It seems that they put a lot of stuff behind a firewall, but many interesting academic papers are still available. The paper that I was looking for was about how to improve radio communications. This may be blindingly obvious, but the answer was to practice, even in garrison. Have your radios set up in your offices. Want to talk to battalion? Pick up the radio, not the phone. Forbid phone use within the battalion.
What should a city do? Perhaps once a month, set up and validate the emergency communications system. Then, the next day, use only the radios and not the phones. Wanna talk to the mayor? He's not taking phone calls today so use your radio. A city wide drill every four years is not going to cut it.
UPDATE: You know, upon further reflection, I don't think we should leave it up to cities to decide whether to use their emergency communications systems every month. If we're giving them federal taxpayers dollars to buy this comm equipment, I want some accountability. Congress should pass the No Emergency Communications Systems Left On the Shelf Act. Cities need to file reports on their monthly communications exercises and the mayor needs to personally sign off on the report.
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