Democrats in Congress should clearly be leading the effort to improve local and FEMA emergency communications systems.
This country has to stop assuming that conventional electricity and gasoline are readily available, especially in emergencies.
One place to start would be requiring that every police station, fire station, hospital, Red Cross disaster recovery office and FEMA manager have a mobile satellite phone, along with some kind of bicycle-charging system.
See here for a description of an off-the-shelf satellite phone system. Froogle gives plenty of other examples that cost less.
The country also has to be prepared for the possibility that Al Qaeda might knock down our satellites.
Possible solutions:
- Make sure that we have so many satellites up there that there's plenty of redundancy.
- Develop special, solar-powered communications blimps or balloons that go up in the air over disaster zones during time of crisis.
- Require that at least one cell phone company in each market -- the one that provides cell phones for emergency responders -- add solar power AND bicycle-powered charging systems to enough towers to allow emergency workers to communicate during times of crisis. At the very least, the workers should be able to send text messages.
- Use blimps with the giant screens to send out basic orders and other information in regions where communications have been knocked out.