When Disaster Strikes: The Critical Role Of 911 During Major Disasters

Emergency communications systems of all kinds shouldn’t be designed so that a single point of failure leads to a catastrophic result. Nothing and no one is perfect. Our emergency communications systems need to be designed to take account of these realities by having appropriate safeguards and redundancies.That’s why I’d like to briefly outline two areas in which the FCC wants to work with the NG911 Institute and others in the public safety community. The first involves best practices. We need to learn from our experiences over the last several months and develop best practices so that we’re better prepared and more effective in responding to future disasters. The second area in which we want to work closely with you is in accelerating the transition of America’s PSAPs to Next Generation 911. Moving to NG911 is important for a whole host of reasons. One that’s sometimes overlooked is that NG911 networks can support greater resiliency, redundancy, and reliability than legacy 911 networks.