Word: meffert
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that commercial phone lines will fail, cell-phone towers will topple, repair teams could take days (or, more likely, weeks) to show up and the National Guard will come packing guns but no walkie-talkies. "In the end, you can only count on yourself," says deputy mayor Greg Meffert, the city's chief technology officer and a onetime tech entrepreneur. Like every other city employee, from the mayor on down, Meffert is worried that the "rookie levee system"--untested since repairs began--could fail again...
...huge headache yet again. During Katrina, New Orleans overnight lost $500 million worth of telecom structure--fiber-optic and copper wire--leaving the city's emergency-operations center at city hall with a superfast T1 line as useless as a set of tin cans. Deputy mayor Meffert ended up handing out Nextel walkie-talkies for all the out-of-town help and cobbling together a voice-over-Internet communications system out of old computers, which still serves the city...
...avoid being caught again "with our britches down," Meffert says, he not only has Plans A and B for emergency communications but also Plans C, D, E and F. He has moved the backup generators to higher ground; installed a wi-fi system downtown and backed up "hot spots" like city hall, emergency operations and the police command center with solar chargers; brought in wi-fi-compliant phones that allow emergency management to text message as well as make calls; and wrangled four vans with satellite uplinks in the event all else fails. Finally, he got what he jokingly refers...