From Charleston Gazette, West Virginia

After Sunday’s catastrophic tornado wrecked Joplin, Mo., police, fire, ambulance and other rescue groups reported a “widespread breakdown of communication systems” as they tried to locate 1,500 residents reported missing.

Back in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, rescuers were forced to send runners with handwritten notes because various emergency radio systems couldn’t link to each other.

During the Kuwait war, different branches of the U.S. military couldn’t reach each other by radio, because they had dissimilar operations.

And in the historic terrorism tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, scores of firefighters died in the collapse of the World Trade Center while police and fire commands couldn’t exchange warning information on their mismatched radio systems.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., says the radio snafu during 9/11 was “probably the greatest killer, other than the planes themselves.”

Rockefeller is crusading to achieve a top recommendation of the 9/11 Commission: creation of a common national emergency communications system to put all responders in touch.

“Today, any 16-year-old with a smartphone is ahead of us in this,” the senator told reporter Paul Nyden. “That is a little bit embarrassing.”

He is pushing the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act, which would ask radio, TV, cell phone and outmoded pager system operators to surrender part of their unused bandwidth for the good of America. Portions would be used for the new national safety plan, and part would be auctioned to raise funds to pay for it.

“This will not cost taxpayers anything,” Rockefeller declared.

Bravo. We hope his long-overdue project succeeds.

West Virginia already has “a voice system that is statewide, but not enough bandwidth to do anything but voice,” state homeland security chief James Gianato said. Police and firefighters need the ability to transmit photos of suspects, blueprints of burning buildings, pictures of fugitive cars, and other visual identification.

Kanawha Sheriff Mike Rutherford said SWAT teams need full images of dangerous locations they’re entering. “We’re very, very excited about this,” he said of the Rockefeller plan.

This newspaper’s late publisher, W.E. “Ned” Chilton III, crusaded for years to create a Kanawha Valley 911 emergency center linking incoming phone calls with all police-fire-ambulance dispatchers. Now the successful center bears his name. In a different way, Rockefeller is striving to unify vital lifesaving communications nationwide. Good for him. 

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