We've Got to Talk: Emergency Communications and Engineering Ethics

Emergency communications technology has rarely been considered from the point of view of engineering ethics. But as recent large-scale disasters such as the World Trade Center attacks and Hurricane Katrina have shown, the failure of emergency radio systems to work as expected can lead to casualties that could have been avoided. The problem is not a purely technical one. While advanced digital communications systems are available to first-responder agencies, the way these systems are designed and procured by individual jurisdictions means that the interoperability and excess capacity needed in large-scale disasters is usually unavailable. In this paper, we show some of the main causes of emergency communications failures in major disasters, how they arise from structural and managerial as well as technical causes, and how these problems may be addressed more effectively in the future.