Can you hear me? After several recent national disasters, gaps in emergency communications still not fixed.

FORT MONROE, Va. -- The ability of military and civilian first responders to communicate during major national emergencies is improving, but roadblocks remain, officials said. Among the problems is that many first responders lack adequate knowledge of their communications equipment.

A small, multi-service military unit, based at this historic facility, is taking a lead role in finding solutions to a knotty national security problem: How can the uniformed services communicate with federal, state and local agencies--and each other--in the aftermath of a major disaster such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina?

Amid the massive destruction wrought by such events, normal means of communications, such as landline telephone and cell phone service, often are disrupted, noted Air Force Col. Babette Lenfant, director of communications systems for the Northern Command's joint task force civil support.

"If they're down, how do first responders communicate with each other? There are alternatives," she told National Defense. "We try to use a layered approach--landlines, cell phones, BlackBerries, pagers, wireless laptop and PC cards, Iridium satellite phones, tactical radios. If one system doesn't work, try another."

A major problem is that local first responders, state and federal relief agencies, and military services are equipped with a hodgepodge of differing systems that often can't communicate with each other.

Lenfant heads a 25-member communications-planning team that is working to find ways around the problem. The team--drawn from the Army, Air Force and Navy--is part of a task force created within NORTHCOM to coordinate military support to the civilian agency heading up the federal response to an incident involving a weapon of mass destruction.

NORTHCOM, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., was established in 2002 as a joint command to improve the ability of all of the military services to protect the domestic United States against such an event. Its mission since has widened to include providing military support following natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes.

The communications team's job is to find ways for military units to talk to their civilian counterparts following disasters, Lenfant said. Every year, she explained, the team serves as the task force's representative in the Defense Department's interoperability communications exercise. DICE, which sponsored by the Defense Information Systems Agency's joint interoperability test command, provides an opportunity for local, state and federal agencies, as well as military units, to practice communicating with each other, as they would have to do during a major disaster.

This year's exercise took place from February through April here at Fort Monroe; Fort Monmouth, N.J; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Camp Pendleton, Calif.; and, Okinawa, Japan. Participants included communications, units from each of the military services, NORCOM, National Guard, Department of Homeland Security, Coast Guard, and city, county and state first responders.

The Air Force sent one of its three-person Hammer adaptive communications element (ACE) teams, which can deploy anywhere, worldwide, within three hours of notification to provide instant and reliable links with relief agencies. A Hammer ACE team carries with it an Iridium satellite phone, a UHF satellite radio, international maritime satellite terminals, a land mobile radio, a video teleconferencing unit, a global positioning system receiver, cell phones, laptop computers and a facsimile machine.

The Hammer ACE system can operate with commercial power, and if that fails, lithium or vehicle batteries, solar panels and portable generators.

The Hammer ACE team deploys with the task force, Lenfant explained. The team provides an ability to communicate rapidly with a wide range of entities, including first responders in the field; federal, state and local government offices; private disaster-assistance groups; news media, and military headquarters.

The DICE exercise enables military units, first responders, Coast Guard personnel and federal homeland security officials to train together, learn what communications gear each has and test the equipment's ability to operate together.

It's much better to do this before disaster strikes, Lenfant said. "The time of an incident is not the time to exchange business cards," she emphasized. "With events such as DICE, we are able to work with the personnel who would respond to an incident beforehand, understand the communications systems and capabilities they bring with them, and work through--or at least highlight--any interoperability challenges without the pressure of a real-world incident, where people are hurt and need assistance."

At this year's exercise, Lenfant said, "Everyone tried to phone and send e-mails to each participant. We tested Web pages and secure and non-secure voice and data transmissions.

"Overall, what we found in this year's exercise is that we could all gain access at some frequency levels, but we found some policies and procedures that really restricted things."

For example, she said, "Suppose I need this Internet protocol address to access your video teleconference, but your organization has a policy limiting access to it?"

Another problem: Many first responders don't know the capabilities of their communications equipment. "They don't have robust exercises. In their exercises, they don't allow you to take down your communications system--to have it fail, as it might in a disaster. If you don't have access to your normal communications channels, what are your alternatives?"

One piece of equipment that received attention at DICE, Lenfant said, was the incident commanders' radio interface. ICRI--developed by Communications-Applied Technology, of Reston, Va.--is a small, rapidly configurable device that allows military radios to talk to those used by local and state police, fire public safety, homeland security and other first responders.

"With ICRI, everybody doesn't have to have the same radio to talk to each other," Lenfant said. "That probably would never happen anyway. The technology changes too rapidly."

Communications failures played a major role in the flawed responses in 2005 to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, witnesses told lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The storms destroyed much of the communications infrastructure throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. "When Katrina hit, it took down radio, telephone and cellular towers," Donald F. Kettl, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, told the House Government Reform Committee. "Many New Orleans police officers were on the streets without any way of communicating with their colleagues or with headquarters."

In addition, he said, Louisiana state police were unable to talk to their peers in local law enforcement, and some units of the National Guard could not communicate with each other.

First responders--particularly incident commanders and safety managers--need to be able to communicate widely in order to acquire key information that is essential in post-disaster decision-making, said Brian A. Jackson, a physical scientist at the RAND Corp. Specifically, he told the House committee, they need to know about:

The hazard environment. "Incident commanders and safety managers need to know the hazards that responders face, what they mean from a safety perspective and what can be done about them," Jackson said. Hazard assessments need to be shared among responding organizations, he added.

The responder work force. Decision makers at a disaster scene need to know who is involved in the response, where they are and what they are doing, Jackson said. This information is needed to make risk-management decisions and to locate responders so that they can be protected against hazards.

Safety issues. Commanders need to know about responder injuries or exposure to hazardous environments. "Getting such information rapidly is critical to enable deployment of protective measures," Jackson said. At the World Trade Center after 9/11, he said, data on responder injuries was not collected in a way that it could be used effectively to address the causes of the injuries.

Safety equipment. Commanders require detailed information about what equipment is available at any given time and how well it matches the hazard environment at the disaster. As an example of the problems that can arise without this kind of information, Jackson cited the interoperability issues following 9/11 at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, including replacement cartridges for respirators and batteries for other equipment that couldn't be interchanged.

Lawmakers placed much of the blame for continued interoperability problems squarely on the Department of Homeland Security. "DHS was overwhelmed and largely unprepared to provide the emergency communications and law-enforcement support the Gulf Coast needed after Hurricane Katrina struck," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "That's a serious failure."

Inability to communicate across disciplines and jurisdictions plagued first responders in previous disasters, particularly 9/11, DHS Inspector General Richard L. Skinner told the committee. In fact, he noted, DHS was created, in part, to correct that flaw.

The law establishing the department in 2002 gave DHS' science and technology directorate the authority to adopt standards for interoperable communications equipment, Skinner said. In addition, the 2004 intelligence reform act required DHS to accelerate the development of such standards.

Yet, Skinner charged, as of March, no standards had been adopted.

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, in testimony before the Senate committee, likened problems with interoperable communications to the "fog of war." To resolve them, he said, "We are creating a hardened set of communications capabilities that will allow DHS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and our federal, state and local partners to gain better situational awareness about conditions and events on the ground as they unfold during a disaster."

DHS has begun creating specialized reconnaissance teams including aircrews from the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"These teams will be self-sustaining and will enter a disaster zone, establish emergency communications and relay vital information back to FEMA and our partners, so that we have a better grasp of events and needs, and we can make sound decisions," Chertoff said. "We also will work to ensure a level of basic interoperability among federal agencies responding to a disaster, including the Department of Defense and NORTHCOM."

For its part, NORTHCOM is working to improve its ability to communicate with nonmilitary partners, its commander, Navy Adm. Timothy J. Keating, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "To improve information sharing, we have installed a gateway between our classified network and DHS' homeland security data network," he explained. "This gateway provides robust classified-information sharing between the two departments.

"To share critical force-protection information with our non-Defense Department partners, we are employing a homeland security command-and-control advanced concept technology demonstration," Keating said. "Through this system, we share information with DHS and public-safety agencies providing emergency response to Defense Department facilities and installations."

Meanwhile, the Joint Task Force Civil Support is contemplating its future. Its headquarters--Fort Monroe, which was founded as an early homeland-defense project following the British invasions of the War of 1812--has been ordered to close as part of the Pentagon's 2005 base realignment and closure program.

The task force, however, is not going far, Lenfant said. Plans, she said, are to relocate the unit at nearby Fort Eustis, so that it can stay close to the Joint Forces Command, with whom it works closely.