Katrina Panelists Debate Whether Crews Need Responder Status

Repair crew access to disasters remains a controversial issue as the FCC Hurricane Katrina Independent Panel assembles a report due June 15. Panelists representing firefighters and police made clear Tues. at the FCC they're reluctant to give repair crews blanket “first responder” status.

BellSouth CTO Bill Smith, the panel’s leading industry executive, told us industry is willing to work with safety officials to avoid problems crews had during Katrina. “We're just looking for progress,” he said: “We don’t want to send our people into what is known to be an unsafe situation… The other extreme is the problems we had last year getting into and out of some of the restricted areas, where you take one exit off the interstate you can’t get in -- you go to the next: ‘Sure, come in.'”

Smith said one crew was trying to repair a cut fiber on a New Orleans levees. “The local police made them leave because of curfew violations,” he said. “This was a major fiber route into and out of New Orleans, very critical. If there was a concern of safety, the better solution would have been to have an officer there, then to send them home.”

Safety officials on the panel are reluctant to tag crews as first responders. Lt. Col. Joseph Booth, La. State Police deputy superintendent, asked if crews really need that status, a term he observed has special meaning to police. “Really what you're looking for is appropriate or timely access,” Booth said: “Getting access is really what you're driving at. Do you see getting designated as emergency responders as the only avenue for you to do that?”

Police aren’t willing to “wave a wand over non- government workers and say, ‘You have access'” behind police lines with no controls, Booth said. He told us he didn’t mean to “push back” against industry demands for special access in disaster, but called credentialing a complex issue. “We're just trying to drill down into what is really being requested by the telecommunications industry,” Booth said: “We don’t object to facilitating and expediting telecom service providers into a disaster area. We need them in there also. We're just saying, do we need a blanket authorization? What is it that you're looking for?”

“As a manager of first responders, we have an accountability issue,” Stephen Dean, chief of the Mobile, Ala. Fire Dept., said: “You can’t just go anywhere you want to go anytime you want to go.” Dean said repair crews must be as “accountable” as emergency workers allowed behind police lines. “I don’t want to be out looking for someone and not know where they are or how long they've been there or if I find their car 30 miles from where they're supposed to be,” he said: “That’s what the troops in the field have to be concerned with as emergency responders.”

Capt. Tim Cannon of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in Fla. warned police agencies often lack personnel to escort crews - a recurring demand post-Katrina. “I was part of the unified command in Mississippi and we were constantly tasked with escorting people,” he said: “We had to make a decision on what we were going to escort and what we weren’t.”