Scrambling after the fact, U.S. federal agencies began deploying mobile satellite-enabled communications services to the battered U.S. Gulf Coast to fill gaps in existing commercial, federal and public safety communications systems interrupted or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

As the storm approached, the American Red Cross began sending equipment and personnel. Emergency response vehicles equipped with satellite dishes and satellite phones with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) capabilities were among the shipment.

In fact, nearly 10,000 satellite phones had poured into the hurricane zone to coordinate relief efforts by U.S. federal disaster personnel and Red Cross workers. The Health and Human Services Department deployed its mobile command post equipped with satellite systems and radios enabling communications with public safety radio systems to Baton Rouge, La.

Before the storm, only a few thousand satellite phones at most were in use across the three-state region affected by the hurricane, and perhaps only a handful of that equipment was in use by local authorities, including at least four of the Louisiana parishes.

A week after this communication need arose, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said communications is a "big challenge," so the National Guard was pushing every communications asset that they had. "Satellite communications is being used because the cellular nets are down and under repair. A lot of the subsurface cabling has been rendered ineffective because of the flooding. So the normal things that would be easy to re-establish would be very difficult to re-establish in the immediate future so we are using other communication means," he added.

But the National Guard, federal and local governments should not be scrambling after the fact to establish communication networks. It is not a mystery that cellular networks falter during large-scale disasters such as last year’s tsunami in Southeast Asia, the recent floods in India and September 11, 2001.

Even though the horrific disaster of the last week in August was unparalleled to anything previously experienced by U.S. federal agencies, knowledge of such a scenario possibly materializing was known.

Likewise, since September 11, 2001, almost $9 billion in federal money has been handed out to the United States local governments for emergency preparedness. So if knowledge of what large-scale disasters can do to a communications infrastructure was already known, satellite-enabled networks had already been successfully used and money was already allocated, why are there not more satellite communications systems in place?

Many government agencies and officials at the federal, state and local levels will have plenty of questions to answer regarding the response to Hurricane Katrina. The failure to adequately prepare for communications failures will be one of the areas that will be examined. Satellite-enabled communications have helped make up for some of this lack of planning, but having these assets ready to go before the situation became desperate could have made the difference for many victims of this disaster. Now, more than ever, is the time for the satellite industry to lobby for more satellite-enabled network adoption and for national and local governments to more completely use satellite in their communications upgrades.