North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Computer systems blamed for feeble hurricane response?

  • From: David Ulevitch
  • Date: Tue Sep 13 14:52:46 2005 
On Sep 13, 2005, at 11:13 AM, Hannigan, Martin wrote:


ObOp: Email is NOT a reliable form of communication.

        ^^^ unrelated and I disagree...


      DHS shouldn't start to think so either. NANOG
      shouldn't worry about if someones email is working
      as a byproduct, but sure worry if the store and forward
      function of an ISP is. '
^^^ There exist networks and operators who do not run ISPs. People often forget.

      Perhaps there are reasons some corporate or volunteer
      mail service is not working i.e. blocked, disallowed on port,
      etc.
^^^ I'm sure there is a reason. My first guess is that it's broken. My second is that it was never intended to be a domain used for email and the website techs never got the memo.

ObNotOp:

Anyone who needs to contact FEMA, already knows how. If they
are using a web page address, they probably shouldn't be contacting
FEMA directly, but working through their own government hierarchy.
In dealing with incidents it is possible to cover many areas of failure. There are many cases where the chain of command, the hierarchy process and many other elements fail. In those times, sometimes getting to a website and finding a contact address serve as a real means of communication and should be regarded as such. History proves the point that out of band comms and other forms of handling are often used during an emergency that were not expected.

Right now if I go to http://www.fema.gov and click on "How to get help" and then "Contact us" I get a 404 forbidden. That's a failure. It's narrow-sighted to underestimate the importance of things like FEMAs website in dealing with national disaster and incident response.

-david