The Importance Of Communication In New Orleans

Communication between the people of New Orleans and the city government was a reason why there was so many casualties. During any natural disaster, winds can harm any communication systems, especially a storm like Hurricane Katrina. Most of modern day communication tools rely on obstacles that are built on land, such as radio antennas and cellphone towers. Katrina's fast winds knocked down a 400 foot antenna that was built to last through winds that would blow up to 150 mile-per-hour. Weakening communication for all citizens in New Orleans. “A majority of the public-safety systems serving police and fire departments in the Gulf Coast region ceased functioning, severely hampering the coordination of rescue efforts” (Piper and Ramos). The New Orleans police department lost communication for nearly three days. This proves there was an absence of communication because they could have sent help instead of waiting for a
call. Because of these failures, big emergency response systems had no way of communicating with each other during a time when cooperation was most important.
In New Orleans, many of the police officers were trying to use the backup radio system on two different channels, this resulted in a setback which caused the messages to be delayed.
Most of these breakdowns happened because of the lack in communications. Major generators were placed on ground floors and were capable of being flooded. As an example, one of the polices transmission sites flooded even though it was ten feet in the air. Other contact systems had stopped working because of the loss of power from the run-down generators. The generators couldn’t be fixed for a couple of days because technicians were not allowed past police roadblocks. Backup systems became weak because they were inefficient enough to withstand all the power they needed to produce. Phone lines that were supposed to be reliable went down due to Katrina. About two million phone companies and cell phones were experiencing problems for being out of service. Some New Orleans citizens were trapped in their homes by waters from the floods and had no way to communicate for
help.

Topic 2: townspeople not listening to warning signals Secondly, people in the city of New Orleans refused to listen to evacuation signals. There can be many reasons why people do not listen to warning signals to evacuate. The people of New Orleans believed they can resist the fast winds and high waters. Other citizens probably had nowhere to go. Some had no form of transportation to leave. Due to experience, townspeople have been lied to, and experienced useless evacuations. “Some people don't have the ability to evacuate, either because they don't have transportation or don't have the money to pay for gas, food, and a hotel for an indefinite period that could possibly stretch to weeks” (Thompson). Some people may be foreign, or are lonely. Residents who have lived through storms have probably survived a smaller storm before and think they can do so again. They might have evacuated before, but the storm did not cause as much damage.