WCN blog

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.

The Wireless Team, comprised of CNT staff, CUWiN volunteers, WISPA professionals and more, is working in both Bay St Louis, MS and Ponchatoula, LA with the Emergency Operation Center to connect 25 shelters with broadband and related resources. Each of the shelters has 100-150 evacuees. The Wireless Crew will set up computers and VoIP phones at each of the sites. The contribution of support and supplies has been quite overwhelming. We would like to extend our utmost gratitude to the Disaster Relief Network, CDW, Lt Governor Pat Quinn and his staff, Pacific Wireless, and Metrix Communications. There are not enough words to express the appreciation for great generosity and commitment.

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 Larsen left I’m taking on the daily updates. We’ve got a map of the shelters, lists of donations and volunteers, etc.

We’re fixing to head to the Gulf coast tomorrow. We’re working out the logistics now and I’ll have details soon.

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.

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

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

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

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 connected. “They cried big tears, hugged my neck, shook my hand and patted me on the back. You’d have thought I was really giving them something that cost a lot of money,” he added. Dearman is working entirely with donated labor and equipment. People from as far afield as Nebraska, Missouri and Indiana are camped out in his house, coordinating equipment deliveries, searching for shelters that need service, and then sending out volunteers to climb towers to hook up radio antennas and set up the networks. “We are basically completely bypassing the phone system,” said Matt Larsen of Scottsbluff, Neb., who said he was perched on a bar stool with his laptop at Dearman’s kitchen counter.

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 blood.

I’m sorry we couldn’t get the phones working just yet. We’ll be back in the morning to get them going.

It was great to meet you, I hope you like the pictures. -Paul

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.

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 here, what are the lessons? In an emergency, open source software and unlicensed spectrum get you up and running fast and cheap and it just works.

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 link is going in place but the name of the town escapes me at the moment.

We just got a trailer as in 18-wheeler tractor dropped off in front of Mac’s house to store gear in as we process donations and inventory them. Last night, we hoisted up a huge circus tent in the backyard to shelter surplus gear and put up tables for the ad-hoc LAN that’s in place.

Lots to talk about, got an update from Gulfport earlier, I’ll try to chime in again here in the next hour or two with more detail, but I can’t stress this enough to wireless volunteers out there looking to help: Mac’s place is the place, absolutely ground zero for this effort.

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”.

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 me know what I’m glaringly missing.

As for equipment, we need this stuff and need to figure out how to get our donors to get stuff shipped asap. I think regardless whether we go to Gulfport we’re going to need this gear regardless. Also I didn’t broach the subject of iffy power. If I hear from Dave Odem tomorrow I’ll find out if these shelters have reliable 110V. If not, reboot, plan b, car batteries and such, limit the scope.

Gulfport, MS plan

7-8 Red Cross shelters, ~3000 evacuees

Time: 3-4 days, including travel

Equipment we need

• 70 VoIP phones
• 25 laptops/PCs (good enough to run Firefox) (currently have 7)
• 20 8 port switches (currently have 1)
• 10 Metrix nodes (currently have 7)
• 15 RJ-45 couplers (just in case)
• 20 power strips (currently have 5)

Personnel

• Paul Smith (Rayville)
• Rogers Wilson III (Rayville)
• +3 volunteers TBI

Vehicles

• CNT minivan
• Another vehicle, pref. truck, van

Supplies

• ~40 gal water
• 20 gal gas
• 5 boxes granola bars
• 2 cases apples
• 2 cases oranges
• eh i need help here what foods should we get that have protein and will keep?

Tentative plan:

• Leave Rayville early Friday morning, arrive Gulfport early afternoon
• Get situated, establish initial node connected to inet backhaul
• Make contact with first shelter, recruit additional volunteers from evacuee population
• install node, set up PCs and VoIP phones, test network link
• Rinse, repeat for rest of shelters

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 of debris and bodies. “Private entities” are opening shelters (this is a phenomenon all across the region, which includes Baptist churches and even farms) but there are too many to keep track of and they experience a lot of flux.

He’s going to talk with his IT people and his superiors in the administration about our offer to provide free networking with VoIP and web browsing via wireless to these Red Cross facilities. They want to make sure that we’re self-contained enough not to create an additional burden, that we have our own gas, food, ability to shelter ourselves, and that the equipment we set up won’t require a lot of babysitting by their people.

It’s about 250 miles from where we are in Rayville, LA. We’re going to try to get them 10 VoIP phones per shelter, and 2-5 laptops or PCs per. We’re going to need at least ten mesh nodes, but I’m awaiting details on the topology. And the whole thing could be scuttled if we can’t get a backhaul link to the Internet somewhere. WISPs are out of the question ’cause they lost all their towers. Hopefully they have a T1 or DS3 or something live in a city facility. Cross your fingers.

Here in northern LA, it’s all rural communities, with very little to no telecom infrastructure to speak of. Wireless ISPs bring connectivity from tall 150-foot towers and multi-mile-long point-to-point wireless links. So in this situation with so many disparate towns and shelters spread throughout, WISPs are perfectly suited to connecting them with voice and Internet services.

Today, the crew here at Mac Dearman’s went out to put a pair of antennas in place for a new end to end link to Tallulah, and worked on getting the backbone network ready for the influx of computers and VoIP phones arriving starting tomorrow.

Things are very fluid here as you can imagine: shelters are being consolidated, so even when you find out where one is, it may get swallowed up by another one before you can get communications in place.

We’re trying to identify need in the hardest hit areas where evacuees are still sheltered. This is in areas near Baton Rogue, and in counties in Mississippi like Harrison and Pearl River. Calls are in to the emergency management administration in each location, more to come …

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 much what we need right now — people with that level of improvisation and expertise.”

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 with no Internet/phone.

A tech from the local CLEC/ISP there says it’s somewhat hilly, there’s an industrial park smack in the middle, and pine trees everywhere. We’re going to try and find the nearest Internet connection to the shelter and create a wireless network to link them in. This will likely to be a city owned facility like a firehall or police station, which the ISP services with T1s and DSLs.

We’re going to need our mesh networking nodes (Metrix Mark Is), a powerful omni t the tap, some flat panel 2.4 GHz antennas, access points, hubs, VoIP phones, and laptops. We already have some nodes, a couple of recycled laptops, and that’s about it. We’re going to be relying heavily on the donations - money & equipment - that are rolling in.

The wireless ISP (WISP) guys here are phenomenal, smart, resourceful and very highly motivated, and they are rolling out to two more towns today, putting up antennas on tall comm towers and grain elevators to bring the Internet connection that Mac Dearman’s ISP serves up from here to the shelters. Rogers is heading out to lend them a hand getting electricity going to a setup in Tallulah, LA.

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 for relief, so they can put their names in “find me” databases.

Where have all these people gone? They’re primarily in shelters spread throughout mid-to-northern Louisiana and Mississippi, in very rural communities: towns of 100 people are sheltering 200 evacuees in the local Baptist church. These places are lucky to have one plain old telephone system line, an Internet connection is unheard of. Wireless ISPs have towers throughout this flat country and can beam network connections over many miles into these remote communities. An antenna and wireless radio on the roof of a shelter can bring several VoIP phones and provide enough bandwidth for a half dozen laptops to use webmail and browse for updates on news websites.