AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
By Peter Benesh
Investor's Business Daily
Seattle's earthquake could have been much worse, but one factor could not have gone better. The region's emergency communications were up to the task.
Why? Because King County, which includes the Seattle area, just finished a seven-year upgrade of its crisis-management radio system.
As a result, police, fire and ambulance officers were able to communicate with each other over the entire 2,200-mile county.
The beauty of the new system is that "all of our primary public safety agencies operate on one common infrastructure," said Kevin Kearns, the county'sdirector of telecommunication services. On Wednesday, the system worked, he says.
That isn't the case in much of the U.S. Many a sheriff can't talk to a city cop on the same street. They need, in communications jargon, interoperability.