Post-Katrina landscape turned into wireless lab

Days, if not weeks ahead
His team headed into the devastated area anyway, and started setting up equipment.

"In the first couple weeks, we were often days if not a week more ahead of the next wave of support for the evacuees and for people on the ground," he said.

FEMA did not return a half dozen calls and e-mail messages seeking comment for this article. An FCC spokesman, David Fiske, requested a list of questions but did not call back.

Meinrath's project has lit up two dozen evacuee centers with Internet as well as a medical clinic in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. A month after the disaster, teams are training local groups.

Malik Rahim, co-founder of a the Common Ground clinic in Algiers, praised the efforts and the pace at which the technology was deployed.

"Within a matter of hours, not days, we had functioning communications established," he said.

In Bay St. Louis, help came from a group based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

That team brought a number of vehicles, including a 33-foot RV loaded with Wi-Fi and satellite gear as well as emerging technologies for carrying high-bandwidth connections over a range of miles.

Commanders sent the team to the hospital in Bay St. Louis, which had been flooded by 4 feet of water.

"It was contaminated from the flood surge. It washed in raw sewage from a sewage plant and chemicals from a local chemical plant," said Brian Steckler, an NPS faculty member who led the team.

Postgrads to the rescue
Within five hours of the NPS team's arrival, anyone with a laptop at the hospital could send e-mail, surf the Web and send instant messages. With an Internet telephone, they could make and receive calls over the connection that's similar to a low-priced DSL link.

To expand coverage, the NPS students deployed Rajant Corp.'s BreadCrumb Wi-Fi equipment to set up additional wireless access points and mesh them together to form a single cloud that could extend for more than 10 miles. The military-grade equipment works even if one node goes down.

The Internet connection also was extended dozens of miles via the emerging standard called WiMax, which has mostly been deployed in limited trials and offers data transfer speeds of 45 megabits per second.

At the end of the WiMax link, Wi-Fi was again used so that laptops and Internet phones could connect.

"The general public is using this for the Web to go their insurance companies," Steckler said. "Before we came, they couldn't even call them, let alone go to them on the Web."

The ad hoc wireless communications efforts have helped city officials in stricken areas begin to get back on their feet.

"It opened us up and allowed us to get more help and more aid in here," Gavagnie said. "It was just a great help."

Yet even the NPS team, which was sent in by the military, had early run-ins with FEMA, which had taken over jurisdiction of the hospital parking lot where the team was working.

"We had to ask FEMA for permission to practically do anything, including use the outhouses," Steckler said.

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