Conversation Stopper

Sprint’s Tanya Lin tells US Infra that failure to prepare crisis communication strategies can have dire consequences during an event.

“Communications are the underpinning of any emergency plan, and ensuring that you have that foundation at the start of a planning process is vitally important”
-Tanya Lin

What role does critical communication strategy have to play in emergency planning? How important is it that communications are considered from the beginning of the planning process?
Tanya Lin. Communications are critical to any strategy in emergency planning. It's basically the foundation of the planning process. It's important to consider the communications methodology, technology and logistics, to include who you'd need to communicate with during a disaster or crisis event from the beginning. Then, when the emergency or disaster does happen, you're able to better facilitate and make sure that you can still communicate to all the parties that you need to and ensure situational awareness and continuity of operations.

You need to have the technology in place to allow you to interoperate between agencies and between critical municipalities, as well as with state and federal government, so communications is really the foundation. Communications is the underpinning of any emergency plan, and ensuring that you have that foundation at the start of a planning process is vitally important.

One significant challenge currently facing emergency planners is the risk of a pandemic event such as swine flu. What part do communications have to play in the response to such challenges?
TL. H1N1 planning or any kind of pandemic planning is unique whether you're an emergency manager for a state, local or federal agency, a corporate entity or you're the emergency business continuity planner for a critical infrastructure component. You have to deal with potentially 40 to 60 percent of your workforce unable to come to work. So pandemic planning and communications go hand-in-hand, because you have to be able to speak with these people and ensure continuity of operations. The employees have to be able to continue to do their jobs, but they have to be able to do them remotely. There could be schools closing, employees falling ill and even mandatory quarantines, but governments and businesses cannot stop functioning so people are going to have to continue to work. Organizations have to be able to function but in this situation they are going to have to rely on remote workers, so you have to depend on communications for this dispersed workforce. Be it, broadband internet at your home, mobile broadband on your laptop, Wi-Fi hotspots or cellular phones, you have to have that communications technology in place before the pandemic strikes, because once it strikes and your workforce is unable to come to work, it will be much more difficult to be able to coordinate the communications of those critical employees to sustain your agency or your business.

If communications systems are unable to speak to one another their effectiveness can be severely hampered. What efforts are being undertaken to ensure interoperability across the space?
TL. One of the things that Sprint and the country as a whole has been working on since 9/11 is interoperability. It's making sure that people can talk together, whether they're using a variety of radio systems or interoperable console devices such as an ACU made by Raytheon or having a compliance standard like P25 across radio systems. Interoperability is something that has been first and foremost on people's minds for the last several years, and so everything that companies are building and working towards is all about ensuring interoperable communications.

So what efforts are being undertaken to see that this happens? Right now, interoperability is key in the marketplace, so you're many finding new technologies that are available. There are new compliance standards to ensure interoperability across broadband networks. The different regulatory committees are working towards compliance standards so that if and when these systems are built, that they can interoperate with one another. It is also important for emergency managers and business continuity planners to identify what other agencies are using and ask questions of their vendors. Can these products interoperate with my current systems and other agency systems?  What is needed to make the disparate systems interoperable?

What are the main challenges in ensuring that communication technologies from different vendors are able to be used in concert?
TL. The main challenge in ensuring interoperability is that there are so many technologies out there. It's important for emergency managers and business continuity planners to identify which technologies will be used and to implement those technologies before the disaster or crisis event. It is also important to exercise those systems and the emergency response plans that you have in place. that's where you're going find what works and what doesn't and can make the adjustments before an event happens.

Agencies and businesses should do table top exercises and full-scale exercises, which are important in any sphere of emergency management and business continuity. You have to be able to identify the technologies that are out there, and you have to be able to use them in a real world type exercise so that when the disaster or emergency does occur, you're not scrambling at the last minute trying patch together a solution.

Critical communication technology needs to be able to operate with great reliability in often very hostile environments. What can be done to ensure that solutions possess the necessary resilience?
TL. One of the things that we do at Sprint is network hardening. You do have to be able to operate in hostile environments. You do have to be able to operate soon after a disaster strikes and ensuring network reliability and hardening is key to Sprint.

If there is an imminent strike event, such as a hurricane, Sprint will often stage generators just outside the immediate impact zone, or proactively mount generators permanently to certain cell sites. We work with different technologies like hydrogen fuel cells for battery backup at cell sites. There are many things that critical infrastructure entities can do to ensure that resiliency across the board. That's the key to Sprint's Emergency Response Team (ERT). If and when that event occurs and you need to have that additional coverage or you need to set up a site that has been completely torn down by a disaster or emergency, Sprint's ERT can deploy mobile cell sites called SatCOLTs (Satellite Cell on Light Truck). The Sprint SatCOLTs are fully self contained, with an on-board generator system, full cell site equipment and satellite backhaul capabilities all mounted on an F-650 chassis allowing us full flexibility of movement and deployment. Sprint invests significant dollars to ensure we are able to provide those resilient communications when communications are critical.

Critical communications need to be able to react to a constantly changing set of environments and challenges. How is it possible to build sufficient flexibility into communications technology?
TL. That's the key. Critical communications do need to be able to react to constantly changing set of environments and challenges. During any incident or during any disaster, things are going to be in a state of flux. They're not always going to go exactly as planned.

Your systems have to be scalable. They have to be flexible, and they have to be rapidly deployable. One of the most important things in communications is being able to adapt to the environment in which we find ourselves during emergencies, be it a hurricane or be it pandemic flu. You have to be able to utilize the same technologies over and over again. Ensuring that your communication systems have built in redundancies, are self-contained and that you have the personnel available to deploy these systems and technologies when it's needed. It's vitally important right from the outset when you start looking into the issue of emergency communications that you're looking at vendors that are flexible, scalable and rapidly deployable.

Tanya Lin is the manager of operations for the Sprint Emergency Response Team (ERT). In this role, she has national responsibility for the operations and direction of Sprint ERT, a one-of-a-kind elite rapid response communications organization that provides interoperability and communication augmentation for Federal, State and Local Public Safety, Law Enforcement, Military agencies and Enterprise clients.