| > My question is, what would have happened if the author hadn't stepped up to do dispatch? Some other solution would have emerged, or the volunteers would have proceeded with a lower level of coordination. > You would have had people searching blindly street by street, not knowing where they were needed. I expect you saw plenty of this in the last week, even with a relatively good communication network in place. It's not necessarily a big problem. It would be a mistake for rescuers on the ground to assume that their dispatchers are omnipotent and to only proceed based on what they're told via radio. You would miss everyone in need of help who was unable to communicate out. > Why can't we make it a national goal to get 911 up and running in a disaster zone in our own country within a similar time period? I feel your comments are grounded in an overestimation of the importance of universally available centralized realtime control in disaster response. That is something we've never had in a genuinely large disaster that takes out a lot of infrastructure. The closest we have to universally available communications is actually Amateur Radio networks. I'm all for spreading that hobby among high school students and encouraging more people to volunteer. We could also do the 911 whatever technological thing you have in mind, but we should proceed with the understanding that we will encounter disasters big enough to knock it over. |