It's More Complicated Than That!

Lessons from Katrina

The article linked below is pretty horrific, and describes what is known about the choices that were made at a hospital in New Orleans after Katrina, including the decision to euthanize patients. There’s a lot to think about in the article, but for people involved in disater relief, emergency management, or other aspects of disaster planning, It’s important to note how the situation begins.

Of course, it begins with a hurricane. and with failing levees, but from the point of view of the people at the hospital, and the ones who were ultimately put in the position of making these decisions, it begins like this:

“Susan Mulderick, a tall, no-nonsense 54-year-old nursing director, was the rotating ‘‘emergency-incident commander’’ designated for Katrina and was in charge — in consultation with the hospital’s top executives — of directing hospital operations during the crisis. The longtime chairwoman of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness committee, Mulderick had helped draft Memorial’s emergency plan. But the 246-page document offered no guidance for dealing with a complete power failure or for how to evacuate the hospital if the streets were flooded.”

It is impossible to plan for everything that might happen. Many things that could happen are of such low probability that there are not planning contingencies made for them. But even of these “rare” events, there are some which will lead to catastrophe and those deserve extra attention. NASA knows this, and some failures are classified as causing “loss of life” - these get extra attention.  Hindsight is perfect, but it seems that generator failure and managing evacuations are two things that are obvious candidates for consideration in a disater plan. In this case we have a series of events with various (arguably) low probabilities - Hurricane strike -> Levee Failure -> Hospital flooding -> Generator failure -> Evacuations, which led to life and death decisions being made under horrific conditions by people who had no advance plan or guidance for those types of decisions.

Plan, drill, revise the plan. Repeat.

Here’s the story: The Deadly Choices at Memorial.

Open Source amateur radio apps at the Huntsville Hamfest

Dave Freese, W1HKJ will be presenting a forum at the Huntsville Hamfest titled “Emergency Communications using HF Digital Modes”. Dave and a core group of contributors have been working for the last few years on a suite of open source applications for amateur radio. The fldigi application is the flagship of these.

Fldigi is a digital modem application which generates and decodes a number of digital modes using the sound hardware in your computer. Amateur radio using digital modes has been growing in popularity, and with good reason. These modes offer a variety of tradeoffs between rf bandwidth, data bitrate, error correction, and noise immunity.

These modes are all sent and received using audio frequencies that fall in the normal voice range used in amateur radio, about 300-3000 Hz. Some modes use very little bandwith, as low as 31Hz, allowing many contacts to take place within a frequency range that would be occupied by one voice contact. These modes are most commonly used with a text interface that resembles internet chat, but are also suitable for inclusion in a higher layer of protocol which allows further error correction, block sending, and retries. When used with a ‘stack’ like this, it is possible to send binary files over amateur radio error-free. This is useful for emergency communications. An example is to be able to send a spreadsheet listing items needed at a shelter, instead of reading and copying every line in the document by voice. The low speeds of these modes limit the usefulness to relatively small files, but a lot of information can be passed in small text files.

Fldigi runs on Linux, Free BSD, Windows XP, W2K, Vista, and OS X. At the hamfest, Dave will be demonstrating using windows and a Linux platform, and I will be helping him demo with my Ubuntu system.

The forum is at the Huntsville Hamfest from 14:00-16:00 on Saturday August 15th, in Salon 10. For more information about these apps, see Dave’s site

Presenting at Atlanta Linux Fest

I’ll be presenting a session at Atlanta Linux Fest titled “Debugging the Kernel”. This presentation originated with Colin King, another member of the Ubuntu kernel team. Colin’s blog has a wealth of debugging information.

The presentation is an overview of various methods used, as applied to increasing difficulty. What can you do when you have no video, no console, no serial ports, and no network? Come find out.

Amateur Radio in School

I’m presenting a forum at the Huntsville Hamfest about the ARRL Teachers Institute on Wireless Technology, and specifically about the amateur radio program under way at Bob Jones High School in Madison, AL. The forum is in Salon 5 at 10:00 Saturday morning

Two years ago, I started talking with teachers at BJHS about an amateur radio program. Over this summer break, eight teachers from the Madison school system attended the ARRL Teachers Institute on Wireless Technology. We are in the process of forming the amateur radio club at BJHS, and we have a lot of momentum going.

If you are interested in bringing amateur radio to a school near you, I think there are four key things that you need to do. The first is to have a contact within the school who understands the potential of the program and will support it within the school system. The second is to have the support of your local amateur radio club. Third, read the ARRL material about the program and make contact with Mark Spencer at the ARRL. Finally, make contact with individuals who have already championed this program in local schools. I was helped in my efforts by Ed Tyler, KI4GKS, who helped set up a program at Pell City High School.

Bad Dell!

I’m stunned by a spectacular failure in Dell’s management of my relationship with them.

I just got a call from them. They’re allowed to do this, as I am a customer and have an account with them. But - it was a robocall that mentioned a new “protection service” for my account, then shifted into an apology that there were no live operators available to transfer to. They left me with the cheerful message that they’ll call back later.

The reason I am a Dell customer is bacause I want to buy their hardware, not their financial services. I suppose I’ll have to wait for their call to explain this to them.