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WCN blog » Katrina Wireless Response

Archive for the 'Katrina Wireless Response' Category

Geek cavalries turn post-Katrina landscape into wireless lab

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

From the Associated Press, October 4, 2005

by MATTHEW FORDAHL

Hours after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and knocked out telecommunications across much of the region, Mac Dearman visited shelters in northern Louisiana to connect telephones.

Dearman doesn’t work for a phone company.

He owns a local wireless Internet service provider, and the gear he set up […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response, Reprints |

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New York Times Sunday Magazine article on WiFi & VoIP

Sunday, September 18th, 2005

Clive Thompson has written an article featuring yours truly and the WCN project in the NYT Sunday Magazine about using WiFi networks for voice & data communications in the event of emergencies like Katrina that knock out the incumbent terrestrial systems.

You can use WiFi to build a do-it-yourself phone system that […]

Posted in General, Katrina Wireless Response |

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Back in Ponchatoula

Saturday, September 17th, 2005

I’m back from 4 days in Bay St Louis. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve gone without email for 4 days in 10 years. Anyway, I have lots and lots to report but for now I’ll just link to this story in Network World.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Sunday update

Sunday, September 11th, 2005

I’ve been a little lax in posting lately, not for being want of things to post about. I’m suprised I forgot to mention it sooner, but there is a website for the command center part of the operation down here:

http://katrina.cnt.org/wordpress/

UPDATE: What a numbskull, I have mentioned it.

Most of those are my photos and since Matt […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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To the River of Life folks

Friday, September 9th, 2005

Click here to see the photos I took while I was there. Lennie, send me that email address for the shelter once you get it set up, and let me know if you need any more help getting that other router/hub set up. Will you need more Cat5? Email me or post a comment here.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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To the Praise Fellowship folks

Friday, September 9th, 2005

Click here to see the photos I took while I was there. Hope that new phone is working better than the old one.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Check out this site

Friday, September 9th, 2005

http://katrina.cnt.org/wordpress/

For all of the latest on shelter connections, computer set-ups and restored communications.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Press

Friday, September 9th, 2005

Hey, the Washington Post has a nice piece on us.

“They just call from shelter to shelter to shelter looking for their kids or for their daddies or their brothers because they got separated, and they are just finding each other in the last few days,” Dearman said, adding that people were often overwhelmed when they […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Message to the folks at the Tallulah Convention Center: your pictures

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Hey everyone at Tallulah Convention Center: my name’s Paul, I was out there earlier helping set up the computers. Click here to see the photos I took while I was there.

If you have trouble with the FEMA forms, I know they’re confusing, grab a young person nearby, they’ll help you, they have computers in their […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Disappointment in Houston

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Our LPFM kin in Houston have been dealt a blow, and by extension the evacuees who need information to put their lives back together. Joel Johnson reports.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Missing person DB

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

I’m sitting here with Jay Dearman who’s Mac’s brother, a minister, and open source geek. He runs ChurchOfThe.Net, and helped get a site called DisasterSearch.org off the ground which he says is the single largest database of missing persons for Katrina victims. For the interested, it’s a custom crafted version of the Mambo CMS.

What’s emerging […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Thursday morning update

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Things are really heating up here at Mac’s. Gear has begun to arrive in quantity: we just pulled 30 Trango 900 MHz APs and SUs off the FedEx truck, plus 20 Cisco/Linksys routers with built-in ATA (VoIP) ports. Teams have rolled to shelters in Tallulah and Winnsboro, taking laptops and phones to evacuees. Another wireless […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Photos

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

We’re posting photos to Flickr (Heather Champ and the Flickr crew has most generously donated pro bono pro accounts to the crew here in Rayville) under the tag “katrinawireless”.

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Tentative plan for Gulfport

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

Let’s say we get the go-ahead from Gulfport to come establish comm there, we’d have to mobilize quickly. I just spent 5 minutes sketching out a tentative plan for this effort, including gear we’ll need. It’s not detailed at all, just a rough sketch to get y’all to react to.

Please review the below, and let […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Gulfport, MS

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

Spoke to Dave Odem, a resource manager over in Gulfport, MS this afternoon. Gulfport’s a neighbor of Biloxi, right on the coast, so there’s no need to belabor describing the state of affairs over there.

He tells me they have 7 or 8 Red Cross-directed shelters, some 3000+ evacuees. Major sections of town are quarantined, because […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Wireless relief effort on Wired News

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin interviewed Sascha about the communications relief effort we’re working on.

“We have a breakdown in many of the things that people rely on to deploy these systems, and then we have people whose expertise is in rubber-banding and bubble-gum-sticking and pulling together things with whatever’s at hand,” Meinrath told Wired News. “That’s very […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Update from Rayville, LA

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

A quick update: today I’m working to figure out where to direct community wireless networking volunteers, what kind of shelters, how many people, what gear we’ll need.

I’ve been talking to April in Hattiesberg, MS, which got hit hard, is only now getting some power restored, and has 2-3000 evacuees in a shelter down Hwy 49 […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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What we’re doing here

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

The wireless networking community here is putting emergency communications infrastructure (Internet connection, plus VoIP - voice over IP - the ability to place calls over the Internet like its a regular phone) so that evacuees can call their family and let them know they’re alive and where they’re at, so they can file FEMA reports […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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Getting to the Gulf

Tuesday, September 6th, 2005

We heard horror stories as we drove south from Chicago to Louisiana that we’d pay $15/gallon for gas, hit 2+ hour lines and then the pumps are dry when you get there, etc. So we found 2 5-gallon tanks and filled ‘em in northern Mississippi, and almost immediately regretted it as now we had a […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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On the ground in northern Louisiana

Tuesday, September 6th, 2005

Rogers and I arrived at Mac Dearman’s farm in Rayville, LA this evening, and found about a dozen enthusiastic wireless engineers in Mac’s communications shed. Mac has an amazing facility here: what seems to be a hundred foot tower, the ability to link locations 50 miles away, 6 muxed-T1s, a OC-12 ring (the only one […]

Posted in Katrina Wireless Response |

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