Breaking news..Apparently a 200 foot section of levee broke last night and is gradually burying the city. Martial Law has been declared in the area as well. Overnight Levee Break: http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050830/NEWS05/5083... Martial Law: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2005/08/breaking-news-martial-law-decl... -- Martin Hannigan (c) 617-388-2663 VeriSign, Inc. (w) 703-948-7018 Network Engineer IV Operations & Infrastructure hannigan@verisign.com

-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Matthew Kaufman Sent: Monday, August 29, 2005 11:47 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Katrina could inundate New Orleans

Dave Stewart:

...

Y'know... I do have to wonder whether Internet access is nearly as important as power and communications (traditional comms, such as the PTSN).

Granted, it'll be interesting to see how things shake out - but I just can't buy that getting the Internet working should/will be a really high priority.

Back when I was running ISPs, we had several county and city Emergency Operations Centers as customers... Either on T1 or frame relay for their primary service, or as their "backup" dial-on-demand ISDN provider. These connections were how the EOC got river gauge data for planning flood evacuations (at the time, no other source other than having the numbers read off from the state-level agency office over the phone if they weren't too busy), USGS earthquake epicenter (also available over EDIS) and shake map (Internet only) data, weather service radar and satellite images (backup was TV broadcasts, if still on the air), and in some counties, the only access to the hospital emergency room status tracking system used for multi-casualty incidents... While there's more private data networks online now, there's also more Internet-available data that the EOCs would like to have access to, I'm sure (I know that some cities are using Internet-connected webcams to do security monitoring, look at shorelines, etc.)

In many incident scenarios (and a few actual incidents), the priority was that the radio system stayed up, then Internet access, *then* PSTN (and having cellphone access to people in the field to supplement the radio system was more important than landline calls to anywhere else). And power, of course, is easily generated locally, so not a big priority at all.

Interestingly, almost none of the agencies told sales what the connection was going to be used for... Only when engineering made a followup inquiry would we learn that, yes, in an emergency, they'd like theirs fixed first please, and yes, they'd need first dibs on the backup power if we didn't have enough to run everything.

Matthew Kaufman matthew@eeph.com